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Congressional Republicans, looking for ways to offset their proposed tax cuts, are seeking to mandate that millions of Americans work in order to receive federally subsidized health insurance. The GOP tax and budget bill passed the House in May, and Senate Republicans are working feverishly to advance their draft of federal spending cuts in the coming days.

Georgia, the only state with a Medicaid work mandate, started experimenting with the requirement on July 1, 2023. As the Medicaid program’s two-year anniversary approaches, Georgia has enrolled just a fraction of those eligible, a result health policy researchers largely attribute to bureaucratic hurdles in the state’s work verification system. As of May 2025, approximately 7,500 of the nearly 250,000 eligible Georgians were enrolled, even though state statistics show 64% of that group is working.

Gov. Brian Kemp has long advocated for Medicaid reform, arguing that the country should move away from government-run health care. His spokesperson also told The Current and ProPublica that the program, known as Georgia Pathways to Coverage, was never designed to maximize enrollment.

Health care analysts and former state Medicaid officials say Georgia’s experience shows that the congressional bill, if it becomes law, would cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in administrative costs as it is implemented while threatening health care for nearly 16 million people.

Here’s how proposed federal work requirements compare to Georgia’s — and how they may impact your state:

What Congress proposes:

The House bill, H.R. 1, and draft Senate proposal require all states to verify that Americans ages 19 through 64 who are receiving Medicaid-funded health coverage are spending 80 hours a month working, training for a job, studying or volunteering. These new verification systems would need to be in place by Dec. 31, 2026, and would have to check on enrolled residents’ work status twice a year. That means people who already receive coverage based on their income level would need to routinely prove their eligibility — or lose their insurance.

The federal work requirements would apply to more than 10 million low-income adults with Medicaid coverage as well as approximately 5 million residents of the 40 states that have accepted federal subsidies for people to purchase private health coverage through what’s commonly known as Obamacare.

The House bill exempts parents with children under 18 from the new requirements, while the Senate version exempts parents with children under 15. Neither bill exempts people who look after elderly relatives.

Georgia’s experience:

Georgia’s mandate applies to fewer categories of people than the proposed federal legislation would. Even so, officials failed to meet the state’s tough monthly verification requirement for Pathways enrollees due to technical glitches and difficulty confirming the employment of those who work in the informal economy such as house cleaners and landscapers because they may not have pay stubs or tax records. The challenges were steep enough that Georgia has decided to loosen its work verification protocols from monthly to once a year.

What this means for your state:

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that H.R. 1 would result in at least 10 million low-income Americans losing health insurance. Health care advocates say that’s not because they aren’t working, but because of the bureaucratic hoops they would need to jump through to prove employment. Research from KFF, a health policy think tank, shows that the vast majority of people who would be subject to the new law already work, are enrolled in school or are unpaid stay-at-home caregivers, duties that restrict their ability to earn a salary elsewhere.

Arkansas is the only state other than Georgia to have implemented work requirements. Republican state lawmakers later changed their minds after data showed that red tape associated with verifying eligibility resulted in more than 18,000 people losing coverage within the first few months of the policy. A federal judge halted the program in 2019, ruling that it increased the state’s uninsured rate without any evidence of increased employment.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, says Medicaid work requirements in H.R. 1 are “common sense.” He says the policy won’t result in health coverage losses for the Americans whom Medicaid was originally designed to help because the work requirements won’t apply to these groups: children, pregnant women and elderly people living in poverty. He points to the $344 billion in a decade’s worth of projected cost savings resulting from Medicaid work requirements as beneficial to the nation’s fiscal health. “You find dignity in work, and the people that are not doing that, we’re going to try to get their attention,” he said earlier this year.

What Congress proposes:

The House bill allocates $100 million to help states pay for verification systems that determine someone’s eligibility. The grants would be distributed in proportion to each state’s share of Medicaid enrollees subject to the new requirements — an amount health policy experts say will not be nearly enough. States, they say, will be on the hook for the difference.

Georgia’s experience:

In the two years since launching its experiment with work requirements, Georgia has spent nearly $100 million in mostly federal funds to implement Pathways. Of that, $55 million went toward building a digital system to verify participants’ eligibility — more than half the amount House Republicans allocated for the entire country to do the same thing.

Like other states, Georgia already had a work verification system in place for food stamp programs, but it contracted with Deloitte Consulting to handle its new Medicaid requirements. Georgia officials said the state has spent 30% more than they had expected to create its digital platform for Pathways due to rising consultant and IT costs. Deloitte previously declined to answer questions about its Pathways work.

What this means for your state:

All states already verify work requirements for food stamp recipients, but many existing systems would need upgrades to conform to proposed federal legislation, according to three former state Medicaid officials. In 2019, when states last considered work requirements, a survey by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office showed that Kentucky expected administrative costs to top $200 million — double what H.R. 1 has allocated for the country.

Rep. Buddy Carter, the Republican who represents coastal Georgia and chairs the health subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which had recommended Medicaid cuts in H.R. 1, said that upfront costs borne by states would be offset by longer-term savings promised in the House bill. Some congressional Republicans concede that the cost savings will come from fewer people enrolling in Medicaid due to the new requirements. Savings from work mandates amount to 43% of the $793 billion in proposed Medicaid cuts, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

What Congress proposes:

Medicaid is a federal social safety net program that is administered differently in each state. Neither H.R. 1 nor the Senate legislative proposal provides a blueprint for how states should verify eligibility or how the costs of overseeing the new requirements will be paid.

Georgia’s experience:

Georgia’s experience shows that state caseworkers are key to managing applications and work requirement verifications for residents eligible for Medicaid. The agency that handles enrollment in federal benefits had a staff vacancy rate of approximately 20% when Georgia launched its work requirement policy in 2023. Georgia at the time had one of the longest wait times for approving federal benefits. As of March, the agency had a backlog of more than 5,000 Pathways applications. The agency has said it will need 300 more caseworkers and IT upgrades to better manage the backlog, according to a report submitted to state lawmakers in June.

What this means for your state:

Former state Medicaid officials and health policy experts say Georgia’s staffing struggles are not unique. In 2023, near the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency, KFF surveyed states about staffing levels for caseworkers who verify eligibility for federal benefits, including Medicaid. Worker vacancy rates exceeded 10% in 16 of the 26 states that responded; rates exceeded 20% in seven of those states.

Adding caseworkers will mean higher costs for states. Currently, 41 states require a balanced budget, meaning that those state legislators would either need to increase taxes and revenues to verify Medicaid enrollees are working or lower enrollment to reduce costs, said Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.

In about half a dozen large states where county governments administer federal safety net programs, the costs of training caseworkers on the new verification protocols could trickle from states to counties.

“There are provisions in there that are very, very, very challenging, if not impossible, for us to implement,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, told reporters in June of the costs facing her state to meet the House bill requirements.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Margaret Coker, The Current.

Shub was never able to secure funding to make this film, which would have been innovative both in its subject matter and in its combination of documentary and fictive elements. Unmade, Shub’s scenario is a site of loss and failure. Yet it is also, as we argue in Incomplete, a site of possibility and promise. For us, Shub’s unrealized project looks different when it’s considered alongside the filmmaker’s decades-long efforts to restore and archive historical footage for the sake of future filmmakers and audiences. Shub was working, as she said in 1927, to create a “historical document for the future.”[2] She was documenting the past in pursuit of a new, revolutionary world. This aspect of her film practice—an application of her steadfast commitment to Bolshevik collectivism, which, as it happened, contributed to her historical neglect in the West as compared to her more avowedly individualistic peer and sometimes-collaborator Sergei Eisenstein—recasts her incomplete project as a gift for others in the future.[3]The incomplete “Women” emerges as a resource, a vital prospect, for future film practitioners, historians, and, perhaps, spectators.

Indeed, even as “Women” remains marked by its unfinishedness, it has served as inspiration for new films by contemporary filmmakers such as Cynthia Madansky and Karen Pearlman. And it opens up our sense of women’s incomplete film and media projects as, in the terms we use in the book, “an archive of possibilities for the future.” One of the pleasures of the ongoing (after)life of Incomplete has been discovering new scholarly and artistic works that likewise approach the incomplete as a site of possibility—works that multiply the pathways we tracked into our book, as well as the many pathways trodden within its chapters. So, on the joyous occasion of the book’s receipt of this year’s Society of Cinema and Media Studies award for Best Edited Collection, we want to take the opportunity to map out some of these new resonances and routes. Here are five projects—among many—we see as essential to the expanding horizons of the feminist incomplete.

1. Film Undone: Elements of a Latent Cinema

A month after the publication of Incomplete, in July 2023, the scholar and curator Philip Widmann brought together artists, filmmakers, curators, researchers, and archivists around the concept of a “latent” cinema: projects left unfinished, unseen, or materializing in non-filmic forms. Alix attended the event in person in Berlin, and all those who missed it can access its traces through a book Widmann edited and published last year. An exercise in and theorization of latency—the metaphor Widmann uses to describe the unfinished in its occluded presence and manifest potential—the book’s gorgeous design foregrounds the material properties of incomplete archives, while also gesturing toward the “collaborative and conversational” liveness of the original event as it coalesced around the social “actualization” of unfinished works.[4]

We learned a lot, especially, from Katie Kirkland’s essay on White Dust from Mongolia, an unfinished feature (partially) made by the Korean American artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Cha conceptualized the project in writing and undertook test shooting in Seoul in May 1980, but the film’s progress was interrupted first by political unrest in South Korea and then by Cha’s violent death, at the age of 31, in November 1982. Amid her vast multimedia archive of finished and unfinished work, Cha’s films remain understudied, but, as Kirkland brilliantly observes, cinema was for Cha “a structure of thinking, a way of subverting chronology to summon forth the co-presence of times that once were and have not yet come to be”—and, in turn, to “channel…transformative communal experience.”[5]

2. Laura Conway, Lass that Has Gone

Stefan met Laura Conway at the Flaherty Seminar in Bangkok last year, and discovered their shared interest in the unfinished. In August 2023, Conway had debuted Lass That Has Gone, a performance-cum-desktop lecture about her projects that never made it, those she calls her “failures of failures.” As she says in the performance, while hallowed “failed” films might be finished (as with David Lynch’s Dune) or unfinished (as with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune), by comparison her own incomplete offerings had also failed at being failures.

We don’t know that this is a fair self-assessment of Conway’s films—especially given that the benchmark for “spectacular” failure in each case is a fabled male auteur—but in any case, what results is a profound work of disarming humor and pathos. Conway takes her title from the title song of the long-running (unfinished) Starz series, Outlander; she sings this song, with the backing of Denver group Fragrant Blossom, at moments throughout the performance when she needs to “reground” herself and her audience. Conway’s care for her viewers is a major part of her practice, which also involves different forms of collaboration. In showing some of her abandoned fragments, for instance, she demonstrates how films gone awry can be the cause for both fights and forgiveness among friends. Later, Conway discusses one of her finished films, The Length of Day, and shares unused footage of the subjects of that film—her grandparents—that strikes a surprising balance between tenderness and silliness. Although framed self-deprecatingly as “failures of failures,” the outtakes and false starts on display, when filtered through the labors of Conway, her friends and her family, mean more to us than David and Alejandro’s failed trips to the planet Arrakis.

3. Zia Anger, My First Film

Another artist’s “failed” film that Conway mentions as being particularly “well-presented” emerged during the pandemic: Zia Anger’s My First Film. Anger’s film was originally staged as a theatrical show in 2019, but it, like Conway’s lecture, also found itself at the confessional intersection of embodied performance and desktop space, allowing for a controlled revelation of the artist and her subject.

An experience offered to fellow travelers in the difficult early days of pandemic lockdowns, Anger’s film performance recounted her attempts between 2010–2012 to make a feature-length work called Always All Ways, Anne Marie that never quite came to fruition. At least, not until 2024, when Anger was finally able to “complete” the film—or rather a metafictional reflection on the film—as the theatrically released feature My First Film.

Alix has written of Anger’s film, which is and isn’t her first film, as a work that sets out to “realize the incomplete film’s potential without denying its failures.” While we can revisit the completed version of the film today, the earlier pandemic performances—open, ephemeral, fraught, inviting—live on only in the minds of those who saw them: a fitting place for the desperate (but now, hopefully, finished) moment of history in which they were created. The two of us feel lucky to have attended one of these initial performances—and we’re sure we’ll never forget this “first” viewing.

4. Maryam Tafakory, Razeh-del

The incomplete often shares space with first projects, which may take draft or fragmentary forms, and which may emerge at a moment not conducive to their finalization, for lack of funding or time or a shared understanding of the project taking shape. In his entry for Sight & Sound’s “Best Video Essays of 2024,” Jiří Anger mentions Incomplete as a useful complement to Maryam Tafakory’s brilliant new essay film, Razeh-del, which like Anger’s performance and feature returns to the origins of the artist’s practice.

Like other works of hers we’ve seen, such as Nazarbazi (2022) and Irani Bag (2021), here Tafakory again weaves together a vast array of (largely unfamiliar) clips from Iranian cinema to get at the heart of censorship and repression in the country, especially where women are concerned. This work tells the tale of the filmmaker’s early efforts to set to rights the invisibilization of women on Iranian screens, as she underlines the dearth of film characters from her youth with whom she was able to identify. As Tafakory points out, given its subject matter, even Two Women (1999), a film directed by a woman (Tahimeh Milani), might have just as easily been called Two Men![6]

Rather than making a film that would correct this imbalance, Tafakory and a friend decided on a more radical action: to write a synopsis for a film they knew the censor would never allow to be made. This scenario for an “impossible film” was published in Zan (Woman), a weekly Persian-language newspaper focused on women’s rights that was founded in July 1998 but was banned less than a year later. The stakes of Tafakory’s essay film are clear, and though it offers glimpses of a project that was (and remains) impossible, the project’s traces are elevated as they are embedded in a resonant story of outlawed feminist print media and a still-repressed film history.

5. Constanze Ruhm, È a questo punto che nasce il bisogno di fare storia (It is at This Point That the Need to Write History Arises)

Tafakory’s work forges connections between Iranian film history, the short life of Zan, and her past and contemporary practice. In her film It is at This Point That the Need to Write History Arises (2024), the Austrian artist Constanze Ruhm sews an even longer thread, casting back first to the Italian feminist group, Rivolta Femminile, and then to the activism of one of its co-founders, Carla Lonzi, in the 1970s and 1980s. In turn, Ruhm picks up on Lonzi’s own historical research—a project on Les Précieuses, a group of French feminists avant la lettre—that remained unfinished at the time of her death in 1982.

Drawing on Lonzi’s notes and ideas for the project, Ruhm stages a complex, layered dialogue between feminist figures centuries apart, pointing toward a diachronic project that is “incomplete” in a deeper sense than Lonzi’s particular unfinished work. The sense of an enduring and shared commitment to feminist practice is also suggested by the title of Ruhm’s exhibition at Vienna’s Charim Galerie in 2024, which included this film: “A Woman’s Work Is Never Done ­– The Culture of Women for the Preservation of Humanity.”

The fragmented histories of women’s work are reflected literally in Ruhm’s film by a mirror in sun-blinding shards. The recurring motif of the broken mirror is reinforced by another of the artist’s key interests: the rehearsal. Ruhm incorporates the casting process into her finished work through several scenes in which actresses audition for roles as feminist activists. These scenes remind us that the repetitive form of the rehearsal documents a work-in-progress that holds the promise of perfection, but which also produces, in the words of Ruhm and Sabeth Buchmann, “unusable time,” including “setbacks, empty rituals, and routines that fizzle out.”[7] As with the feminist project, the rehearsal may never be complete.

Notes.

1] Ėsfir’ Shub, Zhizn’ moia—kinematograf [My Life—Cinema], ed. A. I. Konopleva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972), 286, cited in Graham Roberts, “Esfir Shub: A Suitable Case for Treatment,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 11.2 (1991): 149–59, 155.

[2] Ėsfir’ Shub, “From My Experience,” in “Esfir Shub: Selected Writings,” trans. Anastasia Kostina, intro. Liubov Dyshlyuk, Feminist Media Histories 2.3 (2016): 11–28, 18.

[3] On the gendered discourses of individualistic authorship that venerated Eisenstein and eclipsed Shub, see Martin Stollery, “Eisenstein, Shub, and the Gender of the Author as Producer,” Film History 14 (2002): 87–99.

[4] Philip Widmann, “Melting the Iceberg,” in Film Undone: Elements of a Latent Cinema, ed. Widmann (Berlin: Archive Books, 2024), 14–23, 17.

[5] Katie Kirkland, “Re Dis Appearances: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s White Dust From Magnolia,” in Film Undone, ed. Widmann, 173–85, 175.

[6] On the near-complete absence of pre-revolutionary Iranian women artists in the 1960s and 1970s, see Tara Najd Anmadi, “Archive of Incomplete,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 41.1 (2020).

[7] Sabeth Buchmann and Constanze Ruhm, “Subject Put to the Test,” trans. Karl Hoffmann, Texte Zur Kunst 90 (June 2013). See also Ruhm, “Castingagentur: Casting as Agency,” in Putting Rehearsals to the Test: Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film, Theater, Theory, and Politics, ed. Sabeth Buchmann, Ilse Lafer, and Constanze Ruhm (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 224–33.

This post was originally published on the University of California Press blog and is reprinted here with permission.

The post The Multiplying Pathways of the Feminist Incomplete appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Alix Beeston – Stefan Solomon.

Between tomorrow and Friday, the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC) will host a weapons bazaar that ought to be called “The Merchants of Death”.

The times for these merchants are positively bullish, given that total global military expenditure exceeded US$2.4 trillion last year, an increase of 6.8 percent in real terms from 2022.

The introductory note to the event is mildly innocuous:

“The Land Forces 2024 International Land Defence Exposition is the premier platform for interaction between defence, industry and government of all levels, to meet, to do business and discuss the opportunities and challenges facing the global land defence markets.”

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The website goes on to describe the Land Defence Exposition as “the premier gateway to the land defence markets of Australia and the region, and a platform for interaction with major prime contractors from the United States and Europe”.

At the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre in 2022, the event attracted 20,000 attendees, 810 “exhibitor organisations” from 25 countries, and ran 40 conferences, symposia and presentations.

From 30 nations, came 159 defence, government, industry and scientific delegations.

Land Forces 2024 is instructive as to how the military-industrial complex manifests. Featured background reading for the event involves, for instance, news about cultivating budding militarists.

Where better to start than in school?

School military ‘pathways’
From August 6, much approval is shown for the $5.1 million Federation Funding Agreement between the Australian government and the state governments of South Australia and West Australia to deliver “the Schools Pathways Programme (SPP)” as part of the Australian government’s Defence Industry Development Strategy.

The programme offers school children a chance to taste the pungent trimmings of industrial militarism — visits to military facilities, “project-based learning” and presentations.

Rather cynically, the SPP co-opts the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) aspect of government policy, carving up a direct link between school study and the defence industry.

“We need more young Australians studying STEM subjects in schools and developing skills for our future workforce,” insisted Education Minister Jason Clare. It is hard to disagree with that, but why weapons?

There is much discontent about the Land Forces exposition.

Victorian Greens MP Ellen Sandell and federal MP for Melbourne Adam Bandt wrote to Premier Jacinta Allan asking her to call off the arms event.

The party noted that such companies as Elbit Systems “and others that are currently fuelling . . . Israel’s genocide in Palestine, where 40,000 people have now been killed — will showcase and sell their products there”.

Demands on Israel dismissed
Allan icily dismissed such demands.

Disrupt Land Forces, which boasts 50 different activist collectives, has been preparing.

Defence Connect reported as early as June 4 that groups, including Wage Peace — Disrupt War and Whistleblowers, Activists and Communities Alliance, were planning to rally against the Land Force exposition.

The usual mix of carnival, activism and harrying have been planned over a week, with the goal of ultimately encircling the MCEC to halt proceedings.

Ahead of the event, the Victorian Labor government, the event’s sponsor, has mobilised 1800 more police officers from the regional areas.

Victorian Police Minister Anthony Carbines did his best to set the mood.

“If you are not going to abide by the law, if you’re not going to protest peacefully, if you’re not going to show respect and decency, then you’ll be met with the full force of the law.”

Warmongering press outlets
Let us hope the police observe those same standards.

Warmongering press outlets, the Herald Sun being a stalwart, warn of the “risks” that “Australia’s protest capital” will again be “held hostage to disruption and confrontation”, given the diversion of police.

Its August 15 editorial demonised the protesters, swallowing the optimistic incitements on the website of Disrupt Land Forces.

The editorial noted the concerns of unnamed senior police fretting about “the potential chaos outside MCEC at South Wharf and across central Melbourne”, the context for police to mount “one of the biggest security operations since the anti-vaccine/anti-lockdown protests at the height of covid in 2021–21 or the World Economic Forum chaos in 2000”.

Were it up to these editors, protesters would do better to stay at home and let the Victorian economy, arms and all, hum along.

The merchants of death could then go about negotiating the mechanics of murder in broad daylight; Victoria’s government would get its blood fill; and Melbournians could turn a blind eye to what oils the mechanics of global conflict.

The protests will, hopefully, shock the city into recognition that the arms trade is global, nefarious and indifferent as to the casualty count.

Dr Binoy Kampmark lectures in global studies at RMIT University. This article was first published by Green Left and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The New Zealand government’s immigration decisions amount to a “white immigration policy”, creating a two-tier system that will entrench inequities, claims the Green Party.

National and ACT are also critical of the moves announced by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and top ministers at a Business NZ lunch in Auckland today.

The new policy sees New Zealand’s border fully reopening at the end of July, with sector-specific agreements to support a shift away from lower-skilled migrant labour.

• READ MORE: Other NZ immigration reports

Green Party immigration spokesperson Ricardo Menéndez March said it would entrench a two-tier system.

“The workers that we called essential throughout the pandemic, many will be missing out on genuine pathways to residency and we are narrowing down pathways to residency for those that we consider high-salary migrants. This will entrench inequities,” he said.

“There are really clear wage gaps along ethnic lines — we’re effectively encouraging specific countries to come and become residents whereas people from the Global South who will be coming here, working in low wage industries, with no certain path to residency.”

He was also concerned about the prospect of international students losing working rights after their studies, and the roughly 16,000 overstayers in New Zealand.

‘Feels like a white-immigration policy’
“When we contextualise that many of the students and workers on low wages are from India and the Philippines, it kinda feels like we are creating a white-immigration policy – whether intentionally or otherwise.

“We’re also missing stuff around an amnesty for overstayers as well as addressing issues around migrant exploitation … we’ve been told by the Productivity Commission and many groups that migrant workers need to have their wages decoupled from single employers.

“These are people who have been living here for quite some time, many who are doing really important work but unfortunately are being exploited. If we’re really serious about enhancing workers’ rights, an amnesty should have been part of the rebalance.”

The new immigration settings streamline the residency pathway for migrants either in “Green List” occupations or paid twice the median wage.

National’s immigration spokesperson Erica Stanford said the broad brush approach was lazy.

“They could be far more nuanced and actually have fair wage rates per industry, per region, but instead they’re taking the easy route and a broad brush approach.

“I think it’s based on an unfair assumption that migrant workers drive down wages which, by the way the Productivity Commission said actually doesn’t happen.”

Families ‘separated for too long’
ACT Party leader David Seymour said the border should be open right now and families have been separated for far too long.

“It’s not opening the border in July, it’s opening up applications in July,” he said.

“Immigration New Zealand says that it will be five months on average to process a visa. The reality is if you’re one of 14 percent of New Zealanders born in a non-visa waiver country then your non-resident family can’t visit this year.”

Businesses are relieved the border will fully open and many will attempt to attract migrant workers here.

Business New Zealand’s director of advocacy Catherine Beard said skills shortages were across the board.

“One of the top headaches that we hear everywhere from every sector is a shortage of talent so we really need to throw the welcome mat open to immigrants. We’re competing with other countries for this talent and it’s really hurting.”

NZ Wine Growers chief executive Phil Gregan said re-opening the border to holidaymakers and tourists was important.

“First, it’s a positive signal that we’re open for business. I think it’s also going to have very positive impacts on tourism, on hospitality and our business on wine reseller doors hopefully.”

The wine sector is reliant on seasonal workers.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ganesh Marin – John Koprowski.

Both would curb the stepped-up basis, a giveaway that allows capital gains to pass untaxed from generation to generation. Its elimination would bring tens of billions into the Treasury, give a huge boost to tax fairness, and take a huge bite out of pass-along fortunes.

Taxing the unrealized capital gains of the ultra-wealthy has taken center stage as one of the possible methods. The Biden Administration’s 2023 budget would “establish a 20% minimum tax rate on all American households worth more than $100 million,” including any appreciation in the value of investments that haven’t yet been sold.

Daniel J. Hemel thinks the federal government has long had a better, simpler solution. A professor at the University of Chicago Law School, Hemel  explained everything in a seven-page letter sent early this year to Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey, chairman of the Way and Means Subcommittee on Oversight.

At an Oversight hearing, Pascrell asked a multi-billion-dollar question: “(W)hat specific steps could Treasury and the IRS take to prevent high net-worth individuals and families from avoiding…taxes on intergenerational transfers of wealth?”

Now for Hemel’s multi-billion-dollar answer. From here on in, pretty much everything you see stems from his letter (including some dives into the weeds of tax policy).

The easiest way to understand the issue comes from a phrase that everybody knows, “having your cake and eating it too.” In this case it’s turned into a high-stakes game for some of America’s richest families.

They’re using and abusing the laws to claim an ongoing exemption from capital gains taxes—first for the original owner, then for the next, and on and on. Over and over, gains and taxes are being wiped away and fortunes are being fattened.

The abuses involve irrevocable grantor trusts holding stocks, real estate or other assets.

“If the trust is properly structured, the property will not be included in the individual’s gross estate at death (and thus will not be subject to estate tax.)” No problem so far; Hemel see this as having-your-cake, using a grantor trust to shield the assets from estate taxes.

But, he says, one tax break should never beget another: “High-net-worth individuals and families can have their estate tax ‘avoidance’ cake but cannot eat the income tax benefits” as well. In other words, beneficiaries should be liable for taxes on the accumulated capital gains of the assets they inherit.

In recent years, however, “a handful of estate and gift tax lawyers have suggested that high-net-worth individuals and families may be able to have their cake and eat it too: to claim the estate tax benefit…while also obtaining the income tax benefit of stepped-up basis at death.”

Ironically, the idea owes its momentum to an IRS opinion. A 2012 ruling “appeared to imply” that grantor trusts automatically qualify for a double tax exemption: no estate tax on the value of the trusts, no tax on the capital gains when the trusts are passed on.

Here’s Hemel summing up the reaction: “Tax practitioners described the…ruling as ‘astonishing’ and noted that it ‘gives comfort’ to taxpayers pursuing the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too gambit.” The ruling also contradicts an earlier IRS memorandum that speaks to exactly the same issue.

Long before 2012, through “a vibrant industry of tax shelters,” transactions between grantors and the trusts they created were routinely stiffing the taxman. Hemel again faults the IRS, pointing to a “disastrous” 1985 ruling: “Revenue Ruling 85-13 allows high-net-worth individuals and families to obtain the very same have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too result…”

There’s a simple IRS fix for 85-13, and estate lawyer Turner Berry is all for it: “They could just revoke it….You don’t need congressional legislation to do [it], either; just stand up, be an American, and revoke the ruling.”  Tax scholars Jay A. Soled and Mitchell Gans called for the same action over a decade ago, arguing that “the IRS should not allow itself to be a wallflower, passively watching as the federal coffers are drained.”

The draining won’t completely stop until Congress enacts comprehensive stepped-up basis reform. In the meantime, as Hemel’s letter shows, there’s really no need to wait: the IRS could get the reform underway almost immediately.

• This article first appeared at New York Daily News

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gerald E. Scorse.