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05-08-23 23:17 #12290
Posts: 5481Oh, spending cuts?
Originally Posted by Tiny12 [View Original Post]
Tax Policy Center
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/brie...budget-outlook
To finance TCJAs tax cuts, the government will issue additional Treasury securities and pay additional debt service. Including that spending, the deficit effects of TCJA are larger. CBOs 2018 update, for example, puts the conventional deficit increase from TCJA at almost $2.3 trillion over its first decade. The corresponding dynamic score is a $1.9 trillion increase.
Guess where?
Had Joe Biden not reacted with speed and brilliance at the SOTU Address, Social Security and Medicare would be front and center today on the Repub list of cut demands. And still might be at some point.
Whatever their demands are, guaranteed they aren't going to hurt Warren Buffett or Elon Musk.
Either way, there is no reason on Earth based on their historical record of behavior and results that the entire point of Repubs jacking up the deficit by $Trillions+ for an economic "stimulus" that accomplished virtually nothing except to produce fewer jobs with it than without it was to use it as another tool to produce deep USA economic decline and, if possible, another Repub worldwide economic disaster.
BTW, I wasn't referring to the Qualified Business Income Deduction when I mentioned Trump Crime Family "style" busines tax breaks that were made permanent. Criminals like the Trumps will always be able to launder income through one corporate shield or another in order to dodge paying taxes.
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05-08-23 19:52 #12289
Posts: 11Only applies to 0. 2% of the US population
Originally Posted by Tiny12 [View Original Post]
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05-08-23 19:34 #12288
Posts: 1807Originally Posted by EihTooms [View Original Post]
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
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05-08-23 19:27 #12287
Posts: 3298Originally Posted by JustTK [View Original Post]
"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.
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05-08-23 04:51 #12286
Posts: 5481The TCJA, a Fixable Mistake
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.
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05-07-23 22:22 #12285
Posts: 5481Nope
Originally Posted by Tiny12 [View Original Post]
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.
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05-07-23 21:20 #12284
Posts: 1976Originally Posted by JustTK [View Original Post]
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.
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05-07-23 20:22 #12283
Posts: 1811Originally Posted by Tiny12 [View Original Post]
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.
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05-07-23 20:17 #12282
Posts: 1811Originally Posted by Tiny12 [View Original Post]
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.
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05-07-23 20:10 #12281
Posts: 1811Originally Posted by Tiny12 [View Original Post]
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05-07-23 19:43 #12280
Posts: 1807The Republicans' 2017 tax cuts made our tax system more progressive
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.
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05-07-23 18:53 #12279
Posts: 1807Originally Posted by JustTK [View Original Post]
Originally Posted by JustTK [View Original Post]
The Soviet Union
Poland
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
Romania
Bulgaria
Yugoslavia
Venezuela
Cuba
Nicaragua
Bolivia
Originally Posted by JustTK [View Original Post]
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05-07-23 18:35 #12278
Posts: 1807Originally Posted by LivingFossil [View Original Post]
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05-07-23 17:49 #12277
Posts: 169Originally Posted by JustTK [View Original Post]
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05-07-23 15:49 #12276
Posts: 1811Originally Posted by LivingFossil [View Original Post]