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(The Center Square) Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb signed a bill this week that cuts the states income tax by small amounts over the next seven years, taking it below 3% for the first time in years.

Indiana currently has a flat 3.23% state income tax.

With the new law passed, that rate will drop to 3.15% in tax years 2023 and 2024, to 3.1% in 2025 and 2026, 3% in 2027 and 2028 and then 2.9% for 2029.

Republican legislators celebrated the cut, which, if other states dont make even deeper cuts in the next seven years, will make Indiana tied with North Dakota for the lowest state income tax in the nation, among states that have an income tax.

Others are asking why Indiana can't go further and eliminate the state income tax altogether.

Nine other states have no income tax, said former Libertarian Party candidate for governor Donald Rainwater this week. Why cant we be number 10?

"We'd like to see it eliminated completely," says Joshua Webb, the Indiana state director for Americans for Prosperity.

Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming each have no income tax.

For most of its history, Indiana had neither an income tax nor a sales tax only a property tax. The state income tax was introduced in 1933, during the Great Depression, and the sales tax was imposed in 1962.

This years state income tax cut was unexpected, even after it was announced that because of increased state tax collections, the state was expecting to have a $5.1 billion surplus. Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bay had said in December and January he wanted to wait until 2023 to consider passing tax cuts when the General Assembly does another two-year budget and would have a better handle on the states economic condition following the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Holcomb had also said publicly he wanted to wait on a state income tax cut.

But the Indiana House moved forward, passing a bill, authored by Rep. Tim Brown, R-Crawfordsville, the chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, that provides a total of $1.1 billion in tax relief that comes from lowering the income tax to 2.9% over seven years and also repealing two utility taxes the utility receipts tax and utility use tax.

The bill as it passed the House had also included specific tax relief for businesses in the state, which, in addition to corporate income taxes, also pay an annual tax on all tangible assets owned by the business including all computers, furniture and equipment (with the first $80,000 worth of property exempted).

The House bill would have eliminated the 30% depreciation floor on new business personal property meaning businesses would no longer have to keep paying an annual tax on equipment that was several years old and had no longer retained 30% of its original value.

But that didnt make it through the Senate.

When it went to the Senate, they stripped the tax cuts out, said Natalie Robinson, the NFIB state director in Indiana.

Small businesses affected by the tax include small manufacturers and farmers, who own expensive equipment they may use for a decade or longer, said Robinson.

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Indiana cuts income taxes over the next seven years - The Center Square

Incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp is set for a rematch against Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams, provided he can fend off multiple primary challenges within his own party.

Four years ago, Kemp narrowly beat Abrams to become governor. His most significant challenge comes from former Sen. David Perdue, who is running with former President Donald Trump's support.

Read more: With Trump's backing, ex-Georgia Sen. David Perdue will run against GOP Gov. Brian Kemp

The governor of Georgia is in charge of the executive branch agencies and signs bills passed by the legislature into law, or can choose to veto them. The position has drawn national attention after the close 2018 race and Trump's opposition to Kemp. Kemp acknowledged that President Joe Biden won the presidential race in Georgia and refused to support Trump's efforts to overturn the election results.

That primary will be held on May 24.The general election will be held on Nov. 8., in whichShane Hazel is running for the Libertarian Party and Al Bartell is running as an independent.

Kemp is the current governorand former secretary of state. On his campaign website, he focusses on the work he has doneas governor on business growth, gun rights, and education, including raising teacher's salaries. He signed at least two bills that drew national attention, including the "heartbeat" abortion bill, which sought to ban abortions after about six weeks and was ultimately struck down,and SB 202, which changed how elections are administered in Georgia.Before his time as Secretary State, Kemp was abusinessman and served in the State Senate.

Abrams is the former Minority Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives and ran against Kemp in 2018. Abrams has said she is running on expanding Medicaid, protecting voting rights, and access to education. She is the founder of Fair Fight Action, which has worked nationally onvoting andelection issues, access to medical care andmedical debt in the south. Abrams served 11 years in the Georgia House of Representativesand was known as a bipartisan legislator. In 2010 she was electedHouse Minority Leader.She also has authored a number of fiction and non-fiction books.

Perdue was the Georgia Senator before losing a re-election bid to current Sen. Jon Ossoff in 2021. Perdue has received Trump's endorsement for his false claims that the 2020 election results from Georgia were inaccurate, and he has proposed to create an election law enforcement division. He also wants to eliminate the state income tax, create a parent's bill of rights and pass termadditional limitsfor elected offices. Before his election to the Senate in 2014, Perdue was a businessman, including serving as an executive for Reebok and Dollar General.

Also: Who's running: Where Sen. Raphael Warnock, challengers stand on the issues

Related: Challenges against split of Augusta Judicial Circuit dismissed by Georgia Supreme Court

Davis is a public speaker and activist. According to her website, her priorities include election integrity, religious and medical freedom and opposing abortion.

Taylor works in public education and has worked as a teacher and counselor. Her platform is "Jesus, guns and babies," and she is also running on election integrity and educational issues.

RepublicanTom Williams also qualified to run, but appears not to have submitted contact information. TheChronicle was unable to find any additional information about his candidacy.

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Georgia elections: Who is running for governor in the 2022 primary and general? - The Augusta Chronicle

About six months have passed since the Taliban overran Afghanistan and took control of the capital, Kabul, in the midst of a hasty retreat by an international coalition mired in purposelessness and the usual pains of propping up fragile post-conflict regimes.The ensuing violence and transformations within the country have rightly triggered the international communitys punitive isolation of the Taliban regime. Unfortunately, they have also fueled a humanitarian disaster that began with a severe drought, prior to the violent Taliban takeover, and has only intensified with each passing day.A collapsing economy and the reemergence of harmful actors under a mostly ambivalent Taliban regime are the least of the concerns among most Afghans. After all, even if a harsh winter is about to end, the combined effects of the suspension of all international assistance and humanitarian aid to the country, the COVID-19 pandemic and a famine have left nearly 9 million people on the verge of starvation.Meanwhile, an unperturbed Taliban persists with its human rights violations and crackdowns targeting women, girls, human rights activists and journalists. This has left many people facing persecution and has compounded the woes that have already forced some to flee the country to survive, or at least to strongly consider doing so.Unfortunately, even though the challenging circumstances Afghans face are well documented, many desperate refugees and asylum seekers are yet to receive the generous support and assistance for resettlement they need, particularly from the coalition of nations that were involved in the intervention in Afghanistan.After that two-decade-long intervention, during which more than 2 million people from other countries served in Afghanistan, the current malaise betrays the propensity for links and connections between the Afghan people and the US, along with some of its allies, that other conflict zones simply do not have.A number of Western countries have an almost personal affinity with Afghans, and are more cognizant of the Central Asian countrys woes than they are of problems in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen or Libya. It is these very ties, and an extraordinary level of commitment and dedication by numerous countries around the globe, that resulted in a massive influx of attention, aid and support last August.Private donors, philanthropists and nonprofit organizations led or joined remarkable evacuation efforts. Countries stepped forward with offers to host Afghans, while Western governments coordinated arrivals, vetting procedures and makeshift resettlement initiatives.It was a strange model for preempting what could have been a disastrous refugee crisis but it worked, and its relative successes can be used as a basis on which to formulate adaptive responses to similar crises in future.

Granted, necessity, self-preservation and the need to save face might have been the main motivations for this kind of unprecedented alignment of interests after a humiliating conclusion to a costly, two-decade-long intervention. After all, Western societies appeared fairly evenly split on the question of whether to exit Afghanistan completely or deploy more boots on the ground to halt the Taliban advance and protect what little gains had been made.Regardless, the result was a positive demonstration of what the international community can accomplish when humanitarian needs supersede calls for disengagement in a fragmenting global order at a time when more countries are embracing insularity at the behest of populations wary of costly, rudderless overseas interventions.However, the apathy, division, hostility and confusion that have overtaken discourse on the continued resettlement of refugees are incongruous with the Wests highly touted humanitarian commitments and accomplishments, and what soon awaits beleaguered Afghans as a result is a horrifying tragedy.

Punishing desperate Afghans and denying them aid is not only unsustainable, it is a harbinger of the worst-case scenario.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

It is a far cry from similar, relatively successful efforts dating as far back as the middle of the Cold War, when the aftermath of the Vietnam War and other conflicts in Southeast Asia resulted in nearly 3 million refugees who were eventually resettled between 1975 and the early 1990s in the US, Canada, Europe and parts of Asia.Several other programs have also been quite successful but beginning in the mid-2010s, the global resettlement order appears to have become severely atrophied and crippled in its ability to absorb a massive influx of arrivals, a situation not helped by the growing list of trouble spots in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, parts of the Middle East, and Southwest Asia.Western responses to refugee or migrant crises in many countries are now susceptible to changing national political tides that favor less involvement overseas and more of a focus on shoring up domestic priorities.Worse yet, newly resettled, and even well-established, migrant communities are increasingly the scapegoats for escalating socioeconomic ills amid intensifying culture wars promoted by contrarian, anti-immigrant political forces.These shifting tides continually discourage governments and lawmakers from initiating or fully participating in refugee-resettlement programs because the political costs of doing so increasingly outweigh any potential benefits of accepting new arrivals.This unsettling reality that is taking root in developed countries is contrary to decades of research and documentation about the ways in which refugees and migrants enrich societies, enhance productivity, stimulate economies and complement labor markets.It is, therefore, unsurprising that 85 percent of the more than 84 million forcibly displaced people in the world are hosted by middle-income or developing countries such as Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan and Uganda. Appallingly, in a world where one in every 95 people have left their home countries as a result of conflict or persecution, the contribution of the West to stemming these flows is barely noticeable.The commendable efforts to assist Afghan evacuees and refugees last year, and Ukrainians this year, demonstrate clearly that there is no shortage of international goodwill, capacity or willingness in the world to provide safe havens for those fleeing violence and persecution.A lot of work still needs to be done, however, and the current intransigence is simply unacceptable when it is clear that responding generously and well to the extraordinary challenges in Afghanistan is in the best interests of an array of actors, including interventionist NATO members and neighboring countries that are now hosting large numbers of Afghans.The ongoing Afghan refugee crisis is an opportunity for far-off powers to demonstrate their determination to honor stated commitments or to use their positions of leadership to corral support, in particular Germany, which currently holds the presidency of the G7. It is also an opportunity for the EU to demonstrate moral leadership and show its generosity, to preempt a potential repeat of the European migrant crisis in 2015 should desperate Afghans attempt the dangerous trek northwest in search of hope.The international community must not rest on its laurels after Afghanistan or simply laud its responses to the crisis in Ukraine. It is paramount that it reinvigorate global refugee resettlement processes to better tackle the flow of Afghan refugees and those from any future conflict-related migration crises.Host countries must prioritize safety, education, financial stability and community-building for refugees, which are key to any successful resettlement program, especially if they are tailored to better address the differing priorities among those seeking permanent relief.On a broader level, the international community must also address well-known barriers to successful resettlement and enhance international cooperation, not only to absorb an influx of arrivals but to preempt such crises through smarter interventions.Clearly, more boots on the ground have proven ineffectual at countering violent escalations of conflicts, especially when the government structures they prop up simply collapse within days of the inevitable withdrawal. Similarly, while measures such as punitive isolation, the halting of aid and the conditionalizing of humanitarian assistance might work as leverage in some conflict-prone areas, so far in Afghanistan they have served to compound humanitarian woes more than to nudge the Taliban toward tolerance of certain compromises that would be palatable to the West.Punishing desperate Afghans and denying them aid is not only unsustainable, it is a harbinger of the worst-case scenario which is strange because the world is clearly well prepared to deal with the current crisis but remains unwilling to do what is necessary as the clock runs out.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News' point of view

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Dealing with the Afghan refugee crisis - Arab News

Berlins most haunted street is the Stresemannstrasse: a ragged artery that was once a bustling avenue for arrivals, adjacent to the cavernous Anhalter train station. The station was a main departure point, too, for countless German Jews, communists and others who, from the 1930s on, fled the ever-tightening Nazi net. From May 1945, the station was the end of the line for ethnic Germans fleeing from eastern territories in modern-day Poland and the Czech Republic.

The ruined front portal is all that remains of the Anhalter station, but a new museum directly opposite has just opened its doors with a portentous message. The flow of people we are seeing today from Ukraine, or in 2015 from Syria, is the rule, not the exception, in human history.

Berlins Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation is the right idea at by tragic coincidence the right time.

Berlin is filled with museums about the Nazi dictatorship, but this new institution tells the story of what happened afterwards, when the postwar wave of German refugees fleeing the Red Army turned into something much, much larger. In total, up to 14 million Germans and German speakers were forced to leave their homes across central and southern Europe in what historians describe as the largest movement of people since the Book of Exodus.

At least 500,000 people died along the way of exhaustion, malnutrition or worse as neighbours turned on them and borders shifted the wrong way. For decades this loss of lives, homes, culture and land has been a contested source of pain and shame in Germany (irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/back-in-bohemia-the-sun-shines-on-a-return-to-the-sudetenland-1.1867276) and a massive blind spot in Europes postwar narrative.

Two objects at the heart of the exhibition sum up the documentation centres main aspiration. One is a battered wooden hand cart, the kind used by countless women to transport their belongings from East Prussia, Pomerania and the Sudetenland. Adjacent, a simple nylon rucksack carried by a Syrian arrival during the 2015-2016 refugee crisis that brought more than one million people to Germany.

For director Gundula Bavendamm, the centre is an attempt to move Germanys postwar remembrance culture beyond the victim-perpetrator model to acknowledge the ambivalence of our history and of history in general.

Our exhibition is not about national navel-gazing but rather aims to contribute to a more mature culture of remembrance, one that weights our history in a responsible, nuanced way and puts it in a European context, she says.

In airy, modern new 6,000sq m (64,600sq ft) exhibition spaces the first floor takes a broad historical approach to the theme of forced migration. It focuses in particular on how the rise of the nation state in the 18th century opened the door to nationalism which, when exaggerated to create an idealised sense of identity, has served as kindling for mass murder and countless wars.

Providing this broad context as a foundation, before moving on to the specific German case, was a long and controversial battle but has, Dr Bavendamm suggests, found tragic confirmation in Russias invasion of Ukraine.

The need to homogenise a society, or to make a societal minority part of a majority, is something you can see today in Putins rhetoric, such as him offering Russian passports to people in eastern Ukraine, she says. Our exhibition has a lot to say about how often citizenship has been used to extend and revoke rights from people and thus to engineer the relations between individuals and a society, a state or a nation.

Visitors move up a spiral staircase to the second floor where, with restraint, curators let hundreds of authentic exhibits tell their own tales of lives interrupted. Like a white cloth with the half-finished hand-stitched text: Let your heart be as pure as your kitchen. In addition to the exhibition spaces, a library allows visitors to explore more than 12,000 reports of eye witnesses.

In todays terms, historians say the postwar expulsion pushed by Germanys neighbours but organised by the victorious Aallies would be classified as ethnic cleansing.

The millions of mostly women, children and the elderly arrived on foot or in cattle wagons of the sort previously used to transport European Jews to their death. With curious accents, traditions and outfits, many were an alien sight, and an ideal scapegoat for other Germans guilt and frustration as they struggled to feed their families and rebuild their lives.

There was little compassion or capacity to help the army of new arrivals and discrimination was rife. And when, eventually, Germans began to deal with their Nazi complicity, the suffering of the expellees soon became subordinate to the primary victims of Nazi genocide. Efforts by expellee groups to keep their lives and losses in the public eye grew more desperate, sometimes tipping over into revanchism, and were sidelined by many in Germany as revisionist and relativist.

It was only a decade ago that the first major scholarly study of this era appeared:, Orderly and Humane, written by US-based historian Ray Douglas.

Born in Derry and raised on Dublins northside, Prof Douglas remembers his book tour through Germany as an exhausting series of encounters with grateful survivors and particularly shocking for him their deeply traumatised adult children.

At a signing in Munich a very distinguished psychiatrist came up to me, dropped her book and started weeping into the soaking shoulder of her husband, he recalls. She was born on an expulsion train from Silesia in December 1946 and, though she was a psychiatrist, she was unable to put the trauma of her past behind her.

Prof Douglas is impressed at how, after two decades of emotional debate, the Berlin centre has finally opened its doors, even if the pandemic means that many people including himself have not yet managed to visit.

As the world faces ever-growing numbers of displaced people, he says it has never been more important to build resilience and counter racism among Germans, and other visitors, by reminding us that all people have a shared migrant past.

People being moved around by exposure to conflict is seen by many as a foreign concept, in every sense of the word, but the numbers of displaced people are growing exponentially, he said. This museum is coming at a marvellous time. As the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it: the past hasnt happened yet.

f-v-v.de

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New Berlin museum reminds visitors of shared migration history - The Irish Times

Lindsey German describes how aggression overseas drives racism at home

How do governments who want to wage war on another country win at least the acquiescence and at best active support of large sections of their own population for a process which is going to kill large numbers of people, injure and traumatise many more, and turn millions of people into refugees?

One way is to suggest that the enemy population is somehow not like us, and that therefore the kinds of horror they face during war is less deserving of sympathy than it would be otherwise.

Wars all too often become a source of racism as military domination leads to treating those on the other side as less than human.

We have seen this time after time. During the first world war there was an upsurge of anti-German sentiment, encouraged by government and media, to justify carnage on a previously unknown scale.

The same process was used in every belligerent country to demonise the enemy population. In the US dachshunds were renamed liberty dogs, and sauerkraut liberty cabbage.

More recently, the war on terror has contributed to a great increase in racism. This was against anyone who opposed the war so French fries became freedom fries in the US in response to Frances less than enthusiastic response to the Iraq war.

But its main consequence was the growth of Islamophobia, or hatred of Muslims. The war led to interventions in majority-Muslim countries Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, plus a constant state of tension with Iran.

Iraq and Afghanistan were invaded and occupied, major operations which lasted decades and which involved the siege of Fallujah, the repeated bombing of civilians, evidence of torture, and the mass displacement of millions of people for reasons of war.

The scandal of US treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where they were tortured and filmed in degrading positions by military guards, demonstrated the extent of dehumanisation of the local population and the way in which it was labelled as terrorist for daring to resist the invasion (something which is allowed under international law).

The prisoners in the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay were kept without trial and treated in the most barbaric way.

George W Bush and Tony Blairs war launched after the September 11 attacks depended on a narrative which saw their enemies as variously dictators, terrorists, fanatics and lacking all humanity.

It is a short step from this to justifying the sort of treatment outlined above, and another short step to designating all those of similar backgrounds and religion as terrorist sympathisers who are hostile to our way of life.

This has been the experience of the Muslim communities here in Britain and elsewhere, especially in the countries directly involved in these wars.

They have been subject to physical attacks on individuals, on mosques and community centres, have been targeted by the Prevent system and abused by politicians.

We should remember that our Prime Minister referred to veiled Muslim women as looking like letterboxes and bank robbers statements which led to a big rise in attacks on those wearing hijabs and burqas.

This Islamophobia has fuelled the far right. There has been an increase in far-right terrorist attacks, only belatedly acknowledged given the equation of Muslims with terrorism.

It has all too often fed government responses to migration and to refugees. The refugee crisis of 2015 across Europe led to increased repression against precisely those who suffered so much from the 21st-century wars in which our government has been so complicit.

Refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere are in their majority victims of war and should be treated accordingly.

Instead, fortress Europe has denied most of them entry, forcing them to attempt dangerous and often fatal journeys to get to safety.

Britains refugee and migrant policy is one of the most racist, refusing access to many of the victims of war, claiming there is no money or room for more refugees, while justifying increases in military and arms spending which help fuel future wars.

We are in the middle of a horrendous war, which has already led to the deaths of thousands and an estimated three million refugees from Ukraine.

This war is also seeing an increase in racism, this time directed at Russians. Sportsmen and women, concert pianists and dancers on Strictly have all been told that they must denounce Putins war before they are welcome to perform.

Performances of Tchaikovsky have been cancelled, an adaptation of Tolstoys War and Peace put on hold, and even Russian lessons for primary schoolchildren ditched.

But Putins invasion is not the responsibility of most Russians, many of whom clearly oppose it. The peace movement there has been courageous and defiant.

No such calls met Britains invasion of Iraq, for example. We were not told to denounce it (although many of us did organise against it).

Nor were Jane Austen adaptations or Shakespeare plays boycotted in other countries. Such actions not only seem like hypocrisy and double standards they also lead to racism against Russians and the justification of discriminatory behaviour towards them.

The refugee crisis from Ukraine has also raised questions of racism, with black and Asian people being discriminated against and prevented from getting the same treatment.

While Poland has taken in over a million refugees, its refusal to admit those fleeing war in the Middle East and Afghanistan who tried to enter from Belarus last year displays the double standards at work here.

A wave of sympathy for Ukrainian refugees has forced the British government to backtrack on some of the most racist elements of its policy, which is good, but its policy is at its root racist, and wants to deny responsibility for the victims of its wars.

Peace and anti-war campaigners want to stop wars in themselves, and to stop the militarism and imperialist competition which leads up to them.

However, success in that goal would also mean treating people from different nationalities and races equally and would therefore reduce racism and the violence and repression which accompany it.

On this celebration of Anti-Racism Day, we should never forget how closely connected war and racism remain.

Originally published in Morning Star

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Racism: the ugly offspring of war - Counterfire