American Politics

[ChuchoLoco]

Interesting inititaive taken by California here:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/08/u...rce/index.html

If it goes ahead, it would set a precedent for other states.

Caricom (an organisation of Caribbean nations) is also pressing Europe for reparations:
https://caricom.org/caricom-ten-poin...atory-justice/

And I want reparations too. My family came here and built the steel mills over an hundred years ago. They were severely discriminated against by WASPs. But worked their asses off only to later lose everything to reverse discrimination. Where's our reparations? You must be nuts or related to those who are crying. Sorry but I've been through reverse discrimination for too many years so I resent this stupid act that I'll pay for. Will you contribute? Nothing like buying votes with our money. You need to spend some time in an inner city and see how free money gets wasted. Oh yes, I forgot you're the guy who said working out has no health benefit. ,it's only for vanity. Reparations have no benefit except to those who do nothing to deserve another handout.

Trump is a fool in so many ways but those who want to give out reparations are bigger fools and I will jump to the other side if this becomes the norm!

[JustTK]

Interesting inititaive taken by California here:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/08/u...rce/index.html

If it goes ahead, it would set a precedent for other states.

Caricom (an organisation of Caribbean nations) is also pressing Europe for reparations:
https://caricom.org/caricom-ten-poin...atory-justice/

[Tiny 12]

You forgot to mention we also got a historic economic recovery for America, I would argue leading the world into a historic recovery from the worst Great Repub Economic, Health and National Security Disaster of all time. Oh, and creating 7 Million jobs so far and still counting by remarkable numbers almost every month, a 50+ year record low unemployment rate, an all time low unemployment rate for African Americans, NO Repub-style Great Recession, etc.

We were essentially at the same unemployment rate pre-COVID, thanks in part to the jobs created by the TCJA. And since a Democratic Senate, House and President didn't see fit to modify any of the provisions of the TCJA, the same tax regime, with its favorable effect on jobs, was in effect when Biden took the reins and we rebounded from COVID.

On the other hand, the labor force participation rate, which declined markedly during the Obama administration, was 63.3% pre-COVID, and currently has only rebounded to 62.6%. A lot of people have stopped looking for work.

The majority of analysts are predicting a recession. When that happens, the unemployment rate will go up. Your post, above, will not age well.

[EihTooms]

OK, I'll repeat the link, for the paper written by the Federal Reserve Board economist in 2022:

https://www.dallasfed.org/research/p...58%20 billion.

In 2018 alone, the first year after the provisions of the TCJA took effect, 4.2 million jobs were added, and the economist estimates that 1.5 million of those jobs were attributable to the TCJA. The economist estimates that, in 2018, the TCJA resulted in $158 billion lower federal revenues, which equates to $105,000 per job ($158 billion / 1.5 million jobs = 105,000/ job).

I do not believe it's reasonable to say each job "cost" $105,000. Rather, the the federal government left $158 billion more in the private sector during 2018 as a result of the TCJA, and one of the positive effects was the creation of 1.5 million jobs, in 2018 alone.

Originally, the CBO, JCT and others estimated the TCJA would reduce government revenues by around $1.5 trillion over 10 years. (Estimates ran from 1 trillion to 2 trillion according to your link. I'm picking the midpoint.) Again, however, government revenues as a % of GDP were the 2nd highest in 2022 since 1945. And revenues from the corporate income tax in 2022 were much higher than predicted. Thus the reduction may be less than $1.5 trillion.

And, again, the reduction in revenues from the TCJA pales by the side of the additional $5 trillion in unfunded expenditures passed into law by the Democrats in 2021 and 2022. What did we get for those expenditures? Well, inflation kicked off months earlier in 2021 in the USA compared to the rest of the world, as a result of the American Rescue Plan. Inflation in goods and services rose faster than wages, meaning workers real (inflation-adjusted) income dropped. Hundreds of billions will mindlessly be pumped into the pockets of "green energy" entrepreneurs and chip manufacturers who donated to the Democratic Party. And hundreds of billions more will be spent on infrastructure projects in the districts and states of the Congressmen and Senators who voted for the bill. Wouldn't it make more sense if the states and municipalities selected and paid for infrastructure? I can guaran-damn-tee you the money would be spent more efficiently.

Of course, in your view that doesn't matter, because all legislation passed by Democrats is gold and all legislation passed by Republicans is shit. "Democrat good, Republican bad."

My "cut list", accomplished over a period of years (many years for social security and Medicare), would reduce federal government expenditures by a whole lot more than $1.5 trillion. And Californians could still spend just as much money as they want on reparations, green energy, handouts, and everything else under the sun. The problem is that our federal Congressmen, Senators and Presidents want to run everything everywhere. They believe in concentrating as much power as possible in their hands and the hands of the federal bureaucracy. And that's just not as efficient as running and funding government at the state and local level.

You forgot to mention we also got a historic economic recovery for America, I would argue leading the world into a historic recovery from the worst Great Repub Economic, Health and National Security Disaster of all time. Oh, and creating 7 Million jobs so far and still counting by remarkable numbers almost every month, a 50+ year record low unemployment rate, an all time low unemployment rate for African Americans, NO Repub-style Great Recession, etc.

That was probably just a Bothsider / Neithersider oversight since it didn't immediately leap out of your tortured math to come up with something, anything that suggests all those Great Repub Depressions, Great Repub Recessions and Great Repub Jobs Destruction are really no different and, hey, might even be better for America than all those Great Dem Recoveries, Great Dem Economic Expansions and Great Dem Jobs Creation.

[Tiny 12]

Aside from the fact that my point has always been that the $Trillions+ Repub TCJA created FEWER jobs for America with it than without it, proven by your citation of it supposedly creating a paltry 1. 5 million jobs in an uncited or specified number of years vs the number of jobs that were created in that same span of years prior to the passage of it, now that we are down to what would need to be cut in order to pay the extraordinary deficit-ballooning cost of it, do you have any estimation of the millions upon millions of jobs that would be wiped out, what that would do to the economy and for how many years or decades should your dictatorial cuts wish list come true?

You have provided more proof for how and why Repub tax cuts / policy have been and still are disastrous for the USA economy. Maybe Repubs should all move to Singapore and live in Repub Nirvana bliss. Although I'm not sure how another primary goal of Repubs besides wiping out millions of USA jobs, crashing the USA economy and making already wealthy corporations even wealthier, namely to make sure every school child-hating loon is armed with a fully loaded AR-15, will go over with the Singaporeans.

OK, I'll repeat the link, for the paper written by the Federal Reserve Board economist in 2022:

https://www.dallasfed.org/research/p...58%20 billion.

In 2018 alone, the first year after the provisions of the TCJA took effect, 4.2 million jobs were added, and the economist estimates that 1.5 million of those jobs were attributable to the TCJA. The economist estimates that, in 2018, the TCJA resulted in $158 billion lower federal revenues, which equates to $105,000 per job ($158 billion / 1.5 million jobs = 105,000/ job).

I do not believe it's reasonable to say each job "cost" $105,000. Rather, the the federal government left $158 billion more in the private sector during 2018 as a result of the TCJA, and one of the positive effects was the creation of 1.5 million jobs, in 2018 alone.

Originally, the CBO, JCT and others estimated the TCJA would reduce government revenues by around $1.5 trillion over 10 years. (Estimates ran from 1 trillion to 2 trillion according to your link. I'm picking the midpoint.) Again, however, government revenues as a % of GDP were the 2nd highest in 2022 since 1945. And revenues from the corporate income tax in 2022 were much higher than predicted. Thus the reduction may be less than $1.5 trillion.

And, again, the reduction in revenues from the TCJA pales by the side of the additional $5 trillion in unfunded expenditures passed into law by the Democrats in 2021 and 2022. What did we get for those expenditures? Well, inflation kicked off months earlier in 2021 in the USA compared to the rest of the world, as a result of the American Rescue Plan. Inflation in goods and services rose faster than wages, meaning workers real (inflation-adjusted) income dropped. Hundreds of billions will mindlessly be pumped into the pockets of "green energy" entrepreneurs and chip manufacturers who donated to the Democratic Party. And hundreds of billions more will be spent on infrastructure projects in the districts and states of the Congressmen and Senators who voted for the bill. Wouldn't it make more sense if the states and municipalities selected and paid for infrastructure? I can guaran-damn-tee you the money would be spent more efficiently.

Of course, in your view that doesn't matter, because all legislation passed by Democrats is gold and all legislation passed by Republicans is shit. "Democrat good, Republican bad."

My "cut list", accomplished over a period of years (many years for social security and Medicare), would reduce federal government expenditures by a whole lot more than $1.5 trillion. And Californians could still spend just as much money as they want on reparations, green energy, handouts, and everything else under the sun. The problem is that our federal Congressmen, Senators and Presidents want to run everything everywhere. They believe in concentrating as much power as possible in their hands and the hands of the federal bureaucracy. And that's just not as efficient as running and funding government at the state and local level.

[EihTooms]

If I were dictator? I'd cut the military. We already spend more than the next highest 9 countries put together on defense. And move spending and taxation to the states and localities over time. The power of the purse and decisions on how to spend are best made closest to the people, not in Washington D.C. This would entail cuts in education, health, transportation, housing, labor, etc. Cut out most agriculture subsidies and corporate welfare. And with time replace Social Security and Medicare with something like what Singapore has, where individuals use their own accounts funded through payroll contributions to pay for retirement and, say, the first $10,000 of medical expense per year. That would be backed up with a safety net, including medical insurance. You'd keep expenditures at the federal level which make sense. I'd probably fund the NIH and pandemic preparedness expenditure at similar levels as you would if you were dictator, for example. And we do need a military, just a smaller one.

This left-of-center Tax Policy Center piece must be dated too, like the Brookings piece. They say, "Tax revenues will average just 16.7 percent of GDP from 2020 to 2024, according to CBO's latest projections. That's well below the 17.4 percent of GDP average from 1970 to 2019. " First of all, from an Excel download of the following data, the average federal receipts as a % of GDP from 1970 to 2019 were 17.0%. Federal receipts as a % of GDP in fiscal 2021 and 2022 were 17.4% and 19.2% respectively. Receipts in 2022 were in fact the second highest of any year since 1945, and the fourth highest in American history. And the only tax changes the Democratic government which controlled the presidency and Congress during 2021 and 2022 made didn't take effect until January 1, 2023. So tax revenues under the TCJA tax regime are far outperforming what the CBO predicted.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Absolutely untrue. Please recall the Federal Reserve piece from 2022 that estimated the TCJA added 1.5 million jobs. Tax cuts create jobs. From Mertens and Ravn's classic paper, "A cut in the APITR (average personal income tax rate) raises employment, lowers the unemployment rate, and increases hours worked per worker. " Which makes sense. When the government's taking less of your paycheck, you're more motivated to work. There's probably some kind of multiplier effect too, where by leaving more money in the hands of the people to spend on consumption you end up growing employment.

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprin...103.4.1212.pdf

Well, the Trump family owns pass through entities like LLC's and Sub S Corporations. The tax breaks for those expires at the end of 2025. The permanent cuts for for C Corporations, and I don't believe they account for a significant part of the family's worth.

I believe in treating taxpayers equally so would agree with you about the special tax break businesses like Trump's received in the TCJA. Only large companies with either lots of employment expense or lots of depreciation expense received the benefit of the QBI deduction, and Trump's rental real estate businesses qualified. I also agree with you about the corporate shield and dodging taxes. It's nuts that Trump was able to bankrupt his Atlantic City operation, and as a result receive $900 million in carried forward tax losses that he used to shield income in future years. It was his bondholders that lost the money, and yet he still ended up with the tax deduction. There's a good NYT series on this if you're interested.

Aside from the fact that my point has always been that the $Trillions+ Repub TCJA created FEWER jobs for America with it than without it, proven by your citation of it supposedly creating a paltry 1. 5 million jobs in an uncited or specified number of years vs the number of jobs that were created in that same span of years prior to the passage of it, now that we are down to what would need to be cut in order to pay the extraordinary deficit-ballooning cost of it, do you have any estimation of the millions upon millions of jobs that would be wiped out, what that would do to the economy and for how many years or decades should your dictatorial cuts wish list come true?

You have provided more proof for how and why Repub tax cuts / policy have been and still are disastrous for the USA economy. Maybe Repubs should all move to Singapore and live in Repub Nirvana bliss. Although I'm not sure how another primary goal of Repubs besides wiping out millions of USA jobs, crashing the USA economy and making already wealthy corporations even wealthier, namely to make sure every school child-hating loon is armed with a fully loaded AR-15, will go over with the Singaporeans.

[Tiny 12]

Where would you have cut spending to pay for the $Trillions+ the Repub TCJA was projected to cost the American taxpayer in exchange for not even a 1 percentage point increase in GDP Growth and a Million fewer jobs with it than without it?

If I were dictator? I'd cut the military. We already spend more than the next highest 9 countries put together on defense. And move spending and taxation to the states and localities over time. The power of the purse and decisions on how to spend are best made closest to the people, not in Washington D.C. This would entail cuts in education, health, transportation, housing, labor, etc. Cut out most agriculture subsidies and corporate welfare. And with time replace Social Security and Medicare with something like what Singapore has, where individuals use their own accounts funded through payroll contributions to pay for retirement and, say, the first $10,000 of medical expense per year. That would be backed up with a safety net, including medical insurance. You'd keep expenditures at the federal level which make sense. I'd probably fund the NIH and pandemic preparedness expenditure at similar levels as you would if you were dictator, for example. And we do need a military, just a smaller one.

Tax Policy Center

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/brie...budget-outlook

This left-of-center Tax Policy Center piece must be dated too, like the Brookings piece. They say, "Tax revenues will average just 16.7 percent of GDP from 2020 to 2024, according to CBO's latest projections. That's well below the 17.4 percent of GDP average from 1970 to 2019. " First of all, from an Excel download of the following data, the average federal receipts as a % of GDP from 1970 to 2019 were 17.0%. Federal receipts as a % of GDP in fiscal 2021 and 2022 were 17.4% and 19.2% respectively. Receipts in 2022 were in fact the second highest of any year since 1945, and the fourth highest in American history. And the only tax changes the Democratic government which controlled the presidency and Congress during 2021 and 2022 made didn't take effect until January 1, 2023. So tax revenues under the TCJA tax regime are far outperforming what the CBO predicted.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

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 .

Absolutely untrue. Please recall the Federal Reserve piece from 2022 that estimated the TCJA added 1.5 million jobs. Tax cuts create jobs. From Mertens and Ravn's classic paper, "A cut in the APITR (average personal income tax rate) raises employment, lowers the unemployment rate, and increases hours worked per worker. " Which makes sense. When the government's taking less of your paycheck, you're more motivated to work. There's probably some kind of multiplier effect too, where by leaving more money in the hands of the people to spend on consumption you end up growing employment.

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprin...103.4.1212.pdf

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.

Well, the Trump family owns pass through entities like LLC's and Sub S Corporations. The tax breaks for those expires at the end of 2025. The permanent cuts for for C Corporations, and I don't believe they account for a significant part of the family's worth.

I believe in treating taxpayers equally so would agree with you about the special tax break businesses like Trump's received in the TCJA. Only large companies with either lots of employment expense or lots of depreciation expense received the benefit of the QBI deduction, and Trump's rental real estate businesses qualified. I also agree with you about the corporate shield and dodging taxes. It's nuts that Trump was able to bankrupt his Atlantic City operation, and as a result receive $900 million in carried forward tax losses that he used to shield income in future years. It was his bondholders that lost the money, and yet he still ended up with the tax deduction. There's a good NYT series on this if you're interested.

[Tiny 12]

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?

It's theft in my book, the 99.8%, less some people like me, stealing from the 0. 2%.

[EihTooms]

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

Where would you have cut spending to pay for the $Trillions+ the Repub TCJA was projected to cost the American taxpayer in exchange for not even a 1 percentage point increase in GDP Growth and a Million fewer jobs with it than without it?

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.

Of course, the Repub Party IS calling for cuts in spending now that their TCJA's pointless debt is a major player in why the debt ceiling must be raised to pay for it.

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.

[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.