American Politics

[Diogenees]

When I wrote, "so when you hear someone say that the Republican tax cuts just helped the better off and didn't do jack for the workingman, realize he's full of it," I wasn't referring to you or other esteemed board members. Rather I was referring to politicians, the media, and partisan hired guns like William G. Gale, who wrote the Brookings piece.

The gift and estate tax levy is akin to what Nazis did to Jews before World War II, only applied instead to rich people. It entails taking 40% of everything that a person gives away or dies with, in excess of the exemption. Describing the increase in the exemption as a giveaway is baloney. You're justifying theft.

Furthermore you are wrong about the Qualified Business Income deduction. It sunsets on December 31, 2025.

As to your link, Gale is right in one respect. Republicans controlled the presidency, House and Senate in 2017 and 2018, and are reputedly the party of fiscal sanity. IMHO they should have cut spending. Certainly, given that the economy was in good shape, they should have managed to reduce the national debt as a % of GDP. Instead it grew marginally.

That said, the estimated $1.5 trillion cost of the TCJA over a 10 year period was peanuts compared to the $5 trillion+ in additional spending authorized by Democrats when they controlled the presidency, House and Senate in 2021 and 2022. I put cost in quotation marks, because leaving more money in the hands of the people and businesses is not a cost.

When Gale, in his 2019 piece, characterizes the TCJA as regressive, he's full of shit. At that point in time, you could have looked at the tax tables and known that. The marginal rates on people making $200,000 to $424,000 actually went up, from 33% to 35%.


At this point in time we have the benefit of more history, including IRS tax statistics for the year after the cuts took effect. You can pull them here:

https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-t...d-gross-income

Haskins (see link in my last post) simply compared 2018 tax paid to 2017 tax paid. If you're handy with Excel you can do the same thing in about 30 minutes. All the effects of the TCJA, not just the changes in the tax brackets, are manifested in the actual amounts of taxes paid. Thus say a wealthy businessman benefits from lower tax rates from the Qualified Business Income deduction. That's incorporated into the tax he paid in 2018. Maybe he owns stock in a company. The dividends are higher and the share price goes up because the corporate income tax was lowered, and, as encouraged by the TCJA, the company repatriated cash from overseas. He collects the dividends and sells the stock and that gain is incorporated in his 2018 income.

I don't see how you can argue with that, and if your man Gale revisited his 2019 piece, he'd have to eat crow.

History has proven Gale wrong in other ways. Here's a 2022 piece from an economist at the Federal Reserve,

https://www.dallasfed.org/research/p...158%20billion.


The economist, Anil Kumar, estimates the TCJA resulted in 1.5 million more jobs. GDP at the end of 3 years was 1.23 percentage points higher than it would have been otherwise. The loss in tax revenue was 0.8% of GDP. Going past three years, undoubtedly GDP will continue to grow in excess of what it would have if we'd kept the pre-TCJA tax regime in place. Please note that 1.23% increase by 2020 is much higher than the 0.5% increase by 2028 quoted by your man Gale.

Furthermore, your man Gale was wrong about corporate tax revenues. Corporate tax revenues only fell by 2.3% for 2017 to 2018, and 6% for 2018 to 2019. The TCJA, with lower corporate rates, higher tax rates on foreign income, and provisions to encourage repatriation of cash from overseas, encouraged companies to invest in the USA instead of other countries. But it took some time for that to happen, and in 2022 corporate tax revenues were the highest since 2014.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FCTAX

The estate tax of 10 million wasn't high enough, they needed to raise it, because so many of us are bequeathing 10 million dollars? Seriously? This is who our government prioritizes?

[Tiny 12]

Aside from the most basic characteristic of all Repub "tax / economic policy", it being the wrong thing to do at the wrong time, the doubling of the Estate Tax and Gift Tax giveaway to further the "Dynasty Building For The Wealthy" Repub agenda and the cover it provided before its 2026 sunset for all but Trump Crime Family-type "businesses" to pay for it by cutting resources essential to producing broad and wide-range economic expansion and job growth rather than typical Repub Trickle-Down nothingness, proved it to be just another costly Do Nothing, Know Nothing Repub regressive economic blunder.

BROOKINGS
A fixable mistake: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Sept. 25, 2019

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-fr...-and-jobs-act/

When I wrote, "so when you hear someone say that the Republican tax cuts just helped the better off and didn't do jack for the workingman, realize he's full of it," I wasn't referring to you or other esteemed board members. Rather I was referring to politicians, the media, and partisan hired guns like William G. Gale, who wrote the Brookings piece.

The gift and estate tax levy is akin to what Nazis did to Jews before World War II, only applied instead to rich people. It entails taking 40% of everything that a person gives away or dies with, in excess of the exemption. Describing the increase in the exemption as a giveaway is baloney. You're justifying theft.

Furthermore you are wrong about the Qualified Business Income deduction. It sunsets on December 31, 2025.

As to your link, Gale is right in one respect. Republicans controlled the presidency, House and Senate in 2017 and 2018, and are reputedly the party of fiscal sanity. IMHO they should have cut spending. Certainly, given that the economy was in good shape, they should have managed to reduce the national debt as a % of GDP. Instead it grew marginally.

That said, the estimated $1.5 trillion cost of the TCJA over a 10 year period was peanuts compared to the $5 trillion+ in additional spending authorized by Democrats when they controlled the presidency, House and Senate in 2021 and 2022. I put cost in quotation marks, because leaving more money in the hands of the people and businesses is not a cost.

When Gale, in his 2019 piece, characterizes the TCJA as regressive, he's full of shit. At that point in time, you could have looked at the tax tables and known that. The marginal rates on people making $200,000 to $424,000 actually went up, from 33% to 35%.


At this point in time we have the benefit of more history, including IRS tax statistics for the year after the cuts took effect. You can pull them here:

https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-t...d-gross-income

Haskins (see link in my last post) simply compared 2018 tax paid to 2017 tax paid. If you're handy with Excel you can do the same thing in about 30 minutes. All the effects of the TCJA, not just the changes in the tax brackets, are manifested in the actual amounts of taxes paid. Thus say a wealthy businessman benefits from lower tax rates from the Qualified Business Income deduction. That's incorporated into the tax he paid in 2018. Maybe he owns stock in a company. The dividends are higher and the share price goes up because the corporate income tax was lowered, and, as encouraged by the TCJA, the company repatriated cash from overseas. He collects the dividends and sells the stock and that gain is incorporated in his 2018 income.

I don't see how you can argue with that, and if your man Gale revisited his 2019 piece, he'd have to eat crow.

History has proven Gale wrong in other ways. Here's a 2022 piece from an economist at the Federal Reserve,

https://www.dallasfed.org/research/p...158%20billion.


The economist, Anil Kumar, estimates the TCJA resulted in 1.5 million more jobs. GDP at the end of 3 years was 1.23 percentage points higher than it would have been otherwise. The loss in tax revenue was 0.8% of GDP. Going past three years, undoubtedly GDP will continue to grow in excess of what it would have if we'd kept the pre-TCJA tax regime in place. Please note that 1.23% increase by 2020 is much higher than the 0.5% increase by 2028 quoted by your man Gale.

Furthermore, your man Gale was wrong about corporate tax revenues. Corporate tax revenues only fell by 2.3% for 2017 to 2018, and 6% for 2018 to 2019. The TCJA, with lower corporate rates, higher tax rates on foreign income, and provisions to encourage repatriation of cash from overseas, encouraged companies to invest in the USA instead of other countries. But it took some time for that to happen, and in 2022 corporate tax revenues were the highest since 2014.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FCTAX

[Elvis 2008]

This wasn't a discussion on the pros / cons of socialism. Rather it is me trying to demonstrate to Elvis that he hasnt a clue what socialism is.

This is what you are blathering on about? You take communism and substitute the worker owns things but is managed by the state versus the state owning things (which is meaningless drivel) and toss in freedom of religion and that is the solution to the world's problems? LOL. This is the Venezuelan model.

"We workers are not paid our worth. The value that a worker produces is worth more than the wage he's given. His boss exploits him and his labor for profit. To make money. In the workplace, the worker lives under the dictatorship of his boss. He does not have freedom of speech (he can be fired for saying the "wrong" thing) and there is no democracy; the CEO and the Board of Directors decide everything. The workers are generally not allowed to make decisions for themselves or for the entire company. ".

So the law of supply and demand does not apply to workers? And there is no business where the worker makes money and the owner / manager loses everything? LOL. Are you fucking kidding me? Most businesses fail. This is the stupidest shit I have ever read.

And if you are a third world country like Venezuela, how are you going to attract foreign investment? Are you going to tell companies, "Hey, if you invest here, we are going to steal your business because everything here belongs to the worker. " OMG. Well at least now I know why Venezuela is the way it is. The Venezuelans believed this nonsense.

And you can own land but the worker / government owns all means of production. So if I decide to use my land and grow crops and start a business, then the government / fellow worker owns it? Yeah, that worked real well in the USSR.

Hell, in the USSR, they showed that the people who owned and worked the private lands were only 2% of the lands but grew 30% of the crops. Again, socialists always turn to capitalism when the going gets rough.

If ever there were a country that SHOULD have made it with socialism, it would have been Venezuela with its massive oil reserves and other resources. In truth, the only people who got rich in Venezuela were not the workers but those working for the government and stealing the country blind. It explains the desperation. The people who rose to the top there are not the most productive but the lying, stealing psychopaths.

What is amazing is when you travel and can actually feel the stress and pain of the people. I will never forget going from the USSR to Finland. I was young then but I could literally feel the desperation and unhappiness of the Soviet people and warmth of the Fins. I did not speak either language but I could sense the unhappiness and happiness. I never thought I would feel it again, but I did when I traveled from Venezuela to Colombia.

In contrast, the happiest country I have ever been to was Singapore. I couldn't believe it. Kids were playing outside, smiling, and it reminded me of my growing up in the safe suburbs of my youth. Crime and despair were almost nonexistent then. It was like the show the Wonder Years. I was there at the time of the OJ Simpson verdict and asked the people of Singapore how OJ would have been handled there. I got the same answer from everyone. There would have been no court room show, and the whole thing would have been wrapped up in 3 months.

What really shocked me was the attitude the citizens had with the police. They said, "Yeah, our police would not have screwed up like the American police. " And then there was this comment that caused my jaw to drop, "Our police are fair. " and I heard it over and over again. What other country has citizens who brag about their police? That is what you get when rule of law is clear.

If you took those people and their system and moved it to Venezuela and kicked the Venezuelans out, that country would be the richest on earth. Singapore has nothing resource wise, but they have a system where honesty and hard work pay off versus that of Venezuela where what paid off was subterfuge and lying.

And why is Venezuela such a train wreck? Yeah, it is all the fault of the USA.

We have 3. 4% employment in the USA. Any worker who is not treated well can find his "value" at another company. The very notion that every management team is colluding to keep worker's pay low is hilarious.

This whole socialist thing sounds like the crazy women with golden pussy syndrome who think their pussies are priceless.

[EihTooms]

Aside from the most basic characteristic of all Repub "tax / economic policy", it being the wrong thing to do at the wrong time, the doubling of the Estate Tax and Gift Tax giveaway to further the "Dynasty Building For The Wealthy" Repub agenda and the cover it provided before its 2026 sunset for all but Trump Crime Family-type "businesses" to pay for it by cutting resources essential to producing broad and wide-range economic expansion and job growth rather than typical Repub Trickle-Down nothingness, proved it to be just another costly Do Nothing, Know Nothing Repub regressive economic blunder.

BROOKINGS
A fixable mistake: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Sept. 25, 2019

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-fr...-and-jobs-act/

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA, P. L. 115-97) was the largest tax overhaul since 1986. Rushed through Congress without adequate hearings and passed by a near-party-line vote, the law is a major legislative blunder badly in need of correction. The overall critique is simple: by providing large, regressive, deficit-financed tax cuts to an economy with low unemployment, rising long-term inequality, and high debt, the law was the wrong thing at the wrong time. It will take resources from future generations and from todays lower- and middle-income households to enrich todays well-to-do. It will take resources away from other badly needed social and economic priorities. The bill was so unpopular with the public that Republican members of Congress like Chris Collins and Lindsey Graham resorted to justifying their support by saying that their donors would cut off funding otherwise.

[EihTooms]

Just from looking at the changes in the tax tables after the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) I could tell the TCJA made our tax system more progressive -- see Tables 1 and 2, here:

https://taxfoundation.org/final-tax-...ails-analysis/

But Democrats could argue the tax tables alone don't take into account the effects of the Qualified Business Income deduction and some other changes to the tax code implemented by the TCJA, which preferentially benefitted higher income earners.

Well, Justin Haskins figured out a nifty way around this problem. He simply compared the percentage change in average federal income taxes paid by filers in various income groups before (2017) and after (2018) the TCJA. You can see the results in the last column in Table 1, on page 3, here:

https://heartland.org/wp-content/upl...cy%20Paper.pdf

The results are striking. Tax returns showing income in the range of $1 to $20,000 saw income taxes reduced by 27% to 88%. Those filers making from $20,000 to $100,000 paid 15% to 21% less tax. Taxpayers in the $100,000 to $500,000 brackets paid 11% to 13% less. And those making in excess of $500,000 paid only 3% to 9% less.

So when you hear someone say that the Republican tax cuts just helped the better off and didn't do jack for the workingman, realize he's full of it.

When you hear someone cite the effects of the Republican tax cuts on the lower and middle income margins a year after they were enacted without mentioning what everyone else knew about them, that they were cleverly crafted by the Republicans to sunset after 2-3 election cycles, realize he is full of it.

By the time those tax cuts had evaporated for the lower and middle income margins, Trump and his fellow Repubs had apparently planned to overthrow American democracy enough not to worry about losing anymore elections on the basis that their Jobs Creating and Economy Expansion record of results vs that of the Dems has been atrocious since the late 1920's.

[Xpartan]

This wasn't a discussion on the pros / cons of socialism. Rather it is me trying to demonstrate to Elvis that he hasnt a clue what socialism is.

Elvis doesn't have a clue about anything, but you did say that "open markets can function well under socialism. ".

Tiny was absolutely right debunking this notion with an unimpeachable fact that economically successful socialist states have never existed in the world history.

Thus, your statement is false. There is no proof that "open markets can function well under socialism. " This has never happened before.

NB. I hope you do realize (unlike Bernie Sanders) that neither Denmark nor Sweden are socialist countries. It's quite sad when an old man calls himself a "democratic socialist" with no clue of what socialism really is.

[JustTK]

Can you name a single socialist country in Europe or the Americas that prospered? I can't think of a single one. I can think of a number that are or were basket cases, including.

This wasn't a discussion on the pros / cons of socialism. Rather it is me trying to demonstrate to Elvis that he hasnt a clue what socialism is.

If you want a discussion on pros / cons, we can have it. But first please recheck before we start that you understand the difference between social democracy and democatic socialism.

[JustTK]

JustTK, I took the test and fall square in the middle of the bottom right quadrant, meaning socially liberal and economically to the "right". I believe only a few percent of Americans fall in the same quadrant. Most people want government to run other peoples' lives.

(I am bottom-left quadrant.).

Interesting how you feel about your fellow countrymen. It would be interesting to see some stats on this. My hunch would be that they are right wing and close to centre on liberal-authoritarian axis.

If you are correct, then that would speak volumes about your so-called democracy. Bcos then the government would not be representing the people's interests. How surprising is that! Hehe.

[JustTK]

JustTK's probably referring to the Americas, specifically Latin America.

Right. He didn't mention USA.

[Tiny 12]

Just from looking at the changes in the tax tables after the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) I could tell the TCJA made our tax system more progressive -- see Tables 1 and 2, here:

https://taxfoundation.org/final-tax-...ails-analysis/

But Democrats could argue the tax tables alone don't take into account the effects of the Qualified Business Income deduction and some other changes to the tax code implemented by the TCJA, which preferentially benefitted higher income earners.

Well, Justin Haskins figured out a nifty way around this problem. He simply compared the percentage change in average federal income taxes paid by filers in various income groups before (2017) and after (2018) the TCJA. You can see the results in the last column in Table 1, on page 3, here:

https://heartland.org/wp-content/upl...cy%20Paper.pdf

The results are striking. Tax returns showing income in the range of $1 to $20,000 saw income taxes reduced by 27% to 88%. Those filers making from $20,000 to $100,000 paid 15% to 21% less tax. Taxpayers in the $100,000 to $500,000 brackets paid 11% to 13% less. And those making in excess of $500,000 paid only 3% to 9% less.

So when you hear someone say that the Republican tax cuts just helped the better off and didn't do jack for the workingman, realize he's full of it.

[Tiny 12]

Have you ever taken the political compass test? Give it a go. It is pretty interesting, and also you will learn smthg - https://www.politicalcompass.org/test.

JustTK, I took the test and fall square in the middle of the bottom right quadrant, meaning socially liberal and economically to the "right". I believe only a few percent of Americans fall in the same quadrant. Most people want government to run other peoples' lives. They're all for picking peoples' pockets and / or legislating what they can do with their bodies. Just as you and I believe the USA government shouldn't dictate to other countries what they can do, so I believe the U.S. government shouldn't dictate to me what I can and can't do, without good reason.

Socialism is the worker ownership of the means of production. I have told you this before. Likewise you do not understand what capitalism private ownership of the means of production. Size of govt, rule of law, open markets these are irrelevant to what capitalism is. Open markets can function well under socialism. I explained this to you before. "regulatory efficiency" I dunno what this means.

"Capitalism rewards the hardest working and savviest" I could not disagree with any stronger. It most certainly does not. It rewards the wealthy and the most selfish and ruthless. That much is clear from fundamentals. And there are plenty of rewards for hard work under socialism too.

Can you name a single socialist country in Europe or the Americas that prospered? I can't think of a single one. I can think of a number that are or were basket cases, including.

The Soviet Union

Poland

Czechoslovakia

Hungary

Romania

Bulgaria

Yugoslavia

Venezuela

Cuba

Nicaragua

Bolivia

Again Elvis, you clearly need to do some research in to what socialism is You have bought in to the US govt propaganda lie that it is some murderous dictatorial plot to remove everyone's freedoms and happiness. And the examples you give are all of authoritarian social democracies (I. E. 'bad' capitalist countries). Try reading this for starters:

https://www.socialism101.com/basic

The section on "the right to food and water" is a hoot. How many people have died of starvation because of "worker ownership of the means of production"? Certainly tens of millions, maybe hundreds. Notable examples include famines in Cambodia (1979), the Ukrainian SSR (1932-1934), North Korea (1995-1999), The Soviet Union (1921-1922), and China (1958-1962). There are examples where collectivization of agriculture turned out badly, in countries that you wouldn't necessarily classify as "socialist. " Mexico and Zimbabwe come to mind.

[Tiny 12]

In USA just in one county by Las Vegas?

JustTK's probably referring to the Americas, specifically Latin America.

[LivingFossil]

Paid sex is legal in many parts of America. Just head to the south.

In USA just in one county by Las Vegas?

[JustTK]

If you are running for president I don't care what are your other issues if you support making it legal in America and unlocking Americas greatness then I will vote for you.
Traveling for sex outside of America sucks, but America is an amazing country!

Paid sex is legal in many parts of America. Just head to the south.

[LivingFossil]

If you are running for president I don't care what are your other issues if you support making it legal in America and unlocking Americas greatness then I will vote for you.

Who or when is this going to happen?

Traveling for sex outside of America sucks, but America is an amazing country!