Politics
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- uan0
- teh1
- ********-7
Obama agrees. It's time to "Build the Wall"
- lol. how ironic that you're using obama to "support" your deluded ideas.dorf
- Thanks for pointing out that your views on Obama were completely false, and that your accusations about his administration and immigrantswere complete bullshit.monospaced
- But everything he says here makes complete sense and any reasonable person would agree. He didn't mention rape, a fantasy wall or a ban on Muslims entering thefadein11
- country. You are actually a full blown retard aren't you?fadein11
- In the end, Obama never manned up to Build the Wall. Instead his actions fostered protecting criminals and terrorists. What's so smart about ignoring crime?********
- http://www.politifac…fadein11
- Obviously deportation will reduce crimes committed by illegals. We do so many people argue why we should or shouldn't enforce immigration laws?********
- All I said was Obama made total sense in what he said here, any reasonable person would agree, not a hint offadein11
- stirring unnecessary hatred unlike yourself and the Dotard.fadein11
- there's no need to explain your ignorance. Just waddle back to your corner if reality scares you so.********
- lol, only person scared is you, bitchmonospaced
- allthethings1
From behind WaPo's pay wall:
Republicans are looking for proof their tax cuts will pay for themselves. They won’t find it.
By Matt O'Brien December 1 at 5:43 PM
Republicans have a math problem.
They're on the verge of passing a tax cut that would cost $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years, but they don't want it to cost more than $500 billion. That, apparently, is where their self-styled “deficit hawks,” whose votes the party can't afford to lose, draw the line between fiscal prudence and fiscal folly.
The question, then, is how to find $1 trillion worth of savings. And the answer, of course, is with magic. More specifically, with the kind of wishful thinking that says tax cuts can completely pay for themselves by making the economy grow so much more. It's something that former George W. Bush adviser Greg Mankiw once said only “charlatans and cranks” believe, which doesn't speak well of the current composition of the Republican Party — because most of them believe it today. Indeed, President Trump's top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, said that “we can pay for the entire tax cut through growth.” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin agreed that “the plan will pay for itself with growth.” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said that even “a modest amount of economic growth” could “cover the cost of this bill.” And White House budget director Mick Mulvaney went so far as to say he thinks it “actually generates money.”
No actual expert agrees. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, for one, thinks the Senate plan would barely make the economy grow more over the next decade — enough to pay for only $179 billion of its $1.4 trillion cost. The Penn Wharton Budget Model, for another, estimates that it would add somewhere between 0.3 percent and 0.8 percent to growth over the next 10 years, offsetting $100 billion to $275 billion of its $1.3 trillion cost. And, as we found out Thursday, the official budget scorekeepers at the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation are similarly pessimistic about the prospects of self-financing tax cuts. They estimate that growth would cover only $408 billion of the Senate plan's $1.4 trillion price tag.
That's left Republicans looking for somebody, anybody, who will tell them that their tax cuts wouldn't cost as much as they almost certainly would. And that is where the conservative Tax Foundation comes in. Alone among economic forecasters, it says the Republican tax cuts would increase gross domestic product so much that they wouldn't increase deficits nearly as much as it might seem. In particular, the Tax Foundation thinks that the Senate bill would pay for $1.26 trillion of its $1.78 trillion in tax cuts by generating 3.7 percent more growth — a growth effect that is four to 12 times bigger than in mainstream models.
It's no wonder, then, that the Tax Foundation has become Republicans' favorite think tank. House Speaker Paul D. Ryanhas cited it, along with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and pretty much every other Republican looking for proof that they wouldn't be adding 12 figures' worth of red ink.
Now, anytime somebody is making a much different prediction than everybody else is, it's worth asking why. Which, when it comes to the Tax Foundation, is a much more complicated story than you might think. Before we get to that, though, let's take a minute to talk about economic models. The first thing to understand is that they're not meant to be realistic themselves but to tell us realistic things about the world we live in. The second is that all this has to fit together. You can't assume one thing in one place and a contradictory thing in another. And the third is that different models are built on different assumptions that are appropriate at different times.
Take a middle-of-the-road model like the one the Tax Policy Center uses. It assumes that the United States is what's known as a big open economy — meaning foreign money can come into the country but not flood it — because the United States is, well, a big open economy. It also assumes that unpaid-for tax cuts end up slowing the economy down, since, in the long run, bigger deficits tend to mean higher interest rates. And finally it assumes that the Federal Reserve will do its job and choke off faster growth if inflation rises above its 2 percent target.
The Tax Foundation, on the other hand, doesn't assume any of these things. It starts from the premise that the United States isn't a big open economy like it actually is, but rather a small open one like Ireland. How does that change things? Well, in that case, corporate tax cuts would make foreign investors send mountains of money into the country until, very quickly, the only investments left were ones that offered the same after-tax return as everywhere else in the world. On top of that, it doesn't think tax cuts could ever be bad for growth by leading to, say, higher debt or higher interest rates from the Fed. Which is to say the Tax Foundation assumes that tax cuts have fewer costs and bigger benefits than anybody else does.
But the Tax Foundation isn't just getting more optimistic results because it's making more optimistic assumptions. Even then, it's hard to figure how it gets its numbers. “I've always been puzzled by their model,” Kent Smetters, a former Bush economist who is now the director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, told me, “but there aren't enough details for me to understand it.” Part of it, as Greg Leiserson, the tax director at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, has pointed out, is that the Tax Foundation made a number of mistakes, one of which it's since corrected. But there's also what seems to be a more fundamental problem: The foundation seems to be assuming things that shouldn't be assumed together. Now, I say “seems,” because I asked the foundation about all this, and it still isn't clear exactly what's going on. But there are a few red flags that suggest something is.
The first one has to do with the estate tax. The Tax Foundation thinks getting rid of it would help quite a bit — it's responsible for 0.7 percentage points of the 3.5 points of extra growth it says the House plan would produce — but it's hard to see how that could be, given the model the foundation is using. Think about it like this. You can say taxing uber-wealthy heirs is bad for growth, because they're the ones who have the money to make the investments we need. What you can't do, though, is say that about a small open economy. In that case, people overseas would step in to invest if people at home couldn't. So repealing the estate tax shouldn't matter. The economy should grow the same either way.
The second red flag is how a corporate tax cut would even work. Remember, the small open economy model says this would make a lot of foreign money come in. So you'd expect the share of investment income going to foreigners to go up a lot too. (That's why Ireland's super-low corporate tax rate has helped its GDP stats a lot more than its people: A big chunk of the benefits of foreign investment have to be paid back to, yes, foreign investors.) The Tax Foundation, though, assumes that the share of investment income going to foreigners wouldn't increase at all, even though the share of investment coming from foreigners would. The result is that corporate tax cuts look a lot better for Americans than they actually would be.
What's going on here? Well, we can't say for sure, but it seems like the Tax Foundation has taken a simple idea and applied it in ways that don't quite work together. That idea is that anything that raises taxes on savings — corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes or the estate tax — hurts growth, and anything that cuts them helps it. Where the foundation seems to run into trouble, though, is in always using very strong assumptions about how much these things hurt. The problem is that the assumptions built into the idea that the corporate tax is particularly bad for growth are different from the ones that tell you the estate tax is. So, to try to make it all fit together, the foundation seems to come up with some ad hoc justifications for why things that normally don't go together should here. Maybe that's a study it says backs up its ideas, or a historical relationship, or something like that. What it isn't, though, is a formal model. I asked the foundation if it did that — if it could mathematically reconcile these things — and it doesn't.
The Tax Foundation, for its part, insisted that its model is “best described as a small open economy,” since "'small' is a relative term” and “our share of the world economy has fallen” from 40 percent in 1960 to 25 percent today, with “significant financial flows from other parts of the world” now coming in. It also told me that “all of the assumptions laid out are neoclassical assumptions” that are “a result of an open economy model.” In the specific case of the estate tax, it thinks getting rid of it would still help, even in an open economy model, because it's like a tax businesses have to pay in addition to the corporate tax. But more broadly, its analysts use “comparative statistics,” which “only estimates long-run effects,” and then “generally assume that the economic effects of tax changes take ten years to fully phase in” because, in part, that's what they think has historically been the case.
In any case, this is just another reminder of the value of nonpartisan scorekeepers. You shouldn't rewrite the tax code based on the best of best-case scenarios or on the promise of a secret analysis that supposedly vindicates you. That's what Treasury Secretary Mnuchin did, claiming he had a study showing that the tax cuts really would pay for themselves, before the New York Times reported Thursday that this wasn't true. It turns out there is no study.
Instead, Republicans might want to try inviting experts to answer their questions — they could even call it a “hearing” — or waiting for the budget scorekeepers to run the numbers, or, heck, even writing the bill first before rushing for a vote. It might sound quaint, but the Reagan administration did this for two years when it was working on tax reform. Republicans today have barely done it for two weeks.
It's almost like they want to pass the bill before they find out how much it would actually cost — not that would stop most of them.
Being a fiscal conservative means never having to pay for your tax cuts.
- ********0
- $20 million and all they got was some shitty walls?PhanLo
- $20 billion to actually build it. lol. Thats fuckin hilarioussofakingback
- cant a crazy cartel guy just blow it up with a bazooka?********
- Well according to my BP friends drugs are mostly transported through vehicles and tunnels. Not by people crossing over, they wouldn't be able to carry much.sofakingback
- I was surprised that will all the technology they have, guys are still making it through with tons of drugs in vehicles. So the wall wouldn't even touch on thatsofakingback
- From what they tell me it's just impossible to cover that big of an area. They have helicopters, sensors, inferred cameras, Suvs, ATVs, you name it...sofakingback
- Can't control it. At best catch a group here and there. They get out maneuvered a lot of the time as well. So really americas are paying for a useless wall.sofakingback
- Mexico will be paying for the wall. America is gonna take the money from these drug dealing rapists and ensure its citizens are protected by order of Trump.********
- Dude, get off my dick broooooo lol
#youmadsofakingback - Drones will easily float over this.********
- Make it brick********
- Or stone granite********
- Yeah, Mexico isn't going to pay for shit. Like the US is in a position to demand anything from a sovereign state. Back under your rock, troll boy.face_melter
- Not only is the US in position, but that wall will be a great big beautiful wall********
- your trolling is getting boring now ... you have to work harder to come up with something original, omgmonospaced
- Mexico cannot and will not pay for the wall, which will never be built unless it's on tax payer dollars. Only bigots would support going $20B debt for this.monospaced
- Not true. Money confiscated from Mexican cartels is not tax payer dollars and should be used for funding the wall. Hows is that being bigoted?********
- no, that part is just stupid and untrue, and complete wishful thinking, with no basis in reality. the bigoted part is thinking Mexicans are a threatmonospaced
- The neo-bigotry came from folks like you who created that argument in the first place. If that were true, there would be a Mexican ban, which there isn't********
- $14- $21 Billion was seized from El Chapo. The El Chapo Act could easily be used to Build the Wall.********
- ********2
- Bernie has some great ideas but he's going to be 79 in 2020 and 87 if he lasts 2 administrations. Time to pick someone a few years younger.fooler
- Bernie gotta run just to get the DSA national attention / fuck outta here DNCcolin_s
- Bernie and Pelosi et al need to get behind some younger progressives to help them step up into leadership.monkeyshine
- It'll be Michelle in 2020.monoboy
- Bernie will be dead soon.PhanLo
- ********-5
wtf. lol
Antifa Pixel Font Style Black Flag Circled Men's White Sweatshirt
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- I guess your mother knits all your ill-fitting Nazi garb? Can have her little soldier feeling the cold during those little marches, can she?face_melter
- This is the most design based thing you've posted OMG. Good stuff.PhanLo
- monoboy6
- The poor man has to pay an extra dollar in taxes, the rich man still paid millions of dollars more in taxes.********
- Half True. That's pretty much calling someone out as a lying sack of shit, no?
https://i.imgur.com/…******** - This bill will increase poverty and inequality so much it'll result in a protracted slide to civil unrest.monoboy
- so omg you a paid trump shill or what? because you creepily defend the guy like no other.inteliboy
- I take it by that comment you're cool with the whole deficit, treason and pedophile stuff?monoboy
- Clearly the Trumpsters are 'ok' with all that. Hell, even Tman himself can't stop attacking Hillary...so 'emails'!formed
- clearly you know its all bullshit. cartoon drawn like its still the i980s, but what about all the clones sitting at the same table?********
- Like a Ben Garrison cartoon?monoboy
- what about them omg? are you confused because they aren't labeled? Are you fucking retarded and can't figure it out?monospaced
- I guess the point is to just depict white people as looking the same. None of these folks reflect anyone in the Senate GOP********
- So sad, they couldn't afford color either. How cheap can you be?********
- really, that's what your takeaway is ... offended by misrepresentation of white people? you are so patheticmonospaced
- The poor man has to pay an extra dollar in taxes, the rich man still paid millions of dollars more in taxes.
- CygnusZero44
Well trump has officially endorsed roy moore on twitter. Ladies and gents, the president of the united states has endorsed an accused pedophile for senate.
Sad times I tell ya. Right wingers get their tampons all twisted when I say this country is currently the worlds largest toilet in the world. How many countries have a leader who supports child molesters? Any out there aside from the US?
- The UK is pretty into child molesters too. But usually they are a bit less open about it.PhanLo
- Bu.. but... her FACKIN' EMAILS!face_melter
- yeah im sure there are some, lots of countries in the world, but they cant be as high profile as this.CygnusZero4
- i mean trump just tweeted support of an accused pedophile out to his 45 million followers. unthinkable. how the fuck does he sleep at night?CygnusZero4
- "he's different"fadein11
- plash2
- is this for real? no deductible expenses on office expenses, travel, IT expenses. WTF.fadein11
- well it's not as simple as that, but yeah it has a varying meaning for freelancersplash
- also might be time to start that LLC before 2018.plash
- I'm UK but if my business could not deduct basic running costs I would never have gone self employed in the 1st place. How does that help an economy?fadein11
- You gotta help young start up entrepreneurs as much as possible to create a vibrant economy surely? I didn't realise it was this bad.fadein11
- it's an american tax issue, so it's not small, simple nor easy to understand. shit might need its own thread.plash
- oh trust me UK tax isn't simple. My brother's a partner in the biggest accountancy firm in the world and that doesn't help!fadein11
- My wife and I have an LLC for a rental condo we own and freelance work I do. Have it mostly for financial safety should anything happen with the rental propertymg33
- wait, UK taxes aren't simple. i thought you blokes just paid in crumpets and tea.. i simply have got to get out of the house more.plash
- this affects all freelance designers in the US, especially those who work at homemonospaced
- the fact that the votes for this were based on political party lines is disgustingmonospaced
- Interesting, PBS says it's a boon for small business owners https://www.pbs.org/…robotron3k
- @plash I know, was just explaining my situ. I still don't fully understand basic tax law even with my brothers advice (although admittedly he doesn't workfadein11
- at small business level these days).fadein11
- was being facetious; altho,i still be in trouble since i honestly don't know what a crumpet is.plash
- robo, for "big small business owners" ... aka, not really small at allmonospaced
- and those aren't people like us, who rely on writing off expenses for very small design businessesmonospaced
- Don't worry robo, you'll be fine - i'm sure crayons and toilet paper will remain deductible.face_melter
- The "Big Small Business" wording on that PBS link is really unfortunate. They should be doing a much better job explaining this and not just making up terms.R_Kercz
- allthethings2
From Twitter:
The President formally endorsed a child molester today.
He did this so that the child molester could support a Republican tax plan which takes money from cops, firemen, and nurses...and gives it to Goldman Sachs.
He calls this "draining the swamp."
7:27 AM - 4 Dec 2017
- Fax_Benson1
- Whoa. Eh? This is a bit out of the blue, right?Continuity
- Much as I think Bannon is a waste of human DNA, I don't buy this.Continuity
- A bit of a fruitcake but occasionally her "sources" are accurate, like how her recent Russian collusion post is playing out. But this seems like it may be onfadein11
- the Alex Jones etc spectrum of nonsense.fadein11
- Oh my lol. Mensch is a prime fuckwit.face_melter
- I like when she said David Cameron getting into bestial necrophilia was just a bit of bants with the boys. Like we all pump a decapitated pigs head on the piss.PhanLo
- Would be cool if Bannon had a wee army and fought it out to the death whilst drinking moonshine with pages from the bible taped to his naked body.PhanLo
- I think her 'sources' are actually sauces that she talks to in her pantry. she's beyond daft.Fax_Benson
- sounds like fan fictionmonospaced
- Louise Mensch is fucking awful.colin_s
- I called her a fruitcake but her recent Trump indictment post is playing out pretty accurately.fadein11
- allthethings1
"At this point, to say collusion allegations remain unproven is materially misleading. Collusion has been conclusively proven; we are in the process of learning how extensive it was, and whether, in the course of it, American conspirators committed federal crimes."
- PhanLo7
- oooof ... hahahaRamanisky2
- lolmoldero
- HAHAHA!kona
- Not all heroes...PhanLo
- allthethings1
Paywall.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/b…
Two ugly quotes from Republicans reveal the truth about their tax plan
By Paul Waldman December 4 at 1:37 PM
With Republicans well on their way to passing a dramatic overhaul of the tax code, they have presented to the public a sweeping, comprehensive vision not just of what taxes should look like, but also of what government is there for, what our obligations are to one another and even how each of us should think about our value as human beings. This is a moment of uncommon clarity.
We’ll get to how the tax bill itself fits into that picture, but first I want to present a couple of things influential Republican senators said in the past few days. Let’s start with Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, who made this comment on the estate tax:
“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing,” Grassley said, “as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”
Right now, the first $5.5 million of any estate is not subject to the tax. Because of that, fewer than one in 500 estates owes any tax at all. So Grassley is saying that 99.8 percent of Americans lead contemptible lives of waste and folly, while only that remaining sliver of the extra-wealthy have shown the virtue that should win their heirs the ability not to pay taxes on the fortunes bequeathed to them. The Senate bill would double the tax’s exemption, while the House bill would eliminate the tax entirely; depending on how the final version turns out, Eric Trump may finally be free of the fear that he’ll have to pay taxes on his inheritance.
Now let’s turn to Utah’s Orrin Hatch, who explained why, despite his support of a bill offering trillions of dollars in tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations, we absolutely must start slashing the social safety net immediately:
“I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger, and expect the federal government to do everything.”
Grassley and Hatch are being criticized for these remarks, but we should appreciate that this isn’t one of those occasions when politicians are just spinning. There isn’t much political advantage in saying that if you die with less than $5.5 million in assets, like nearly all Americans do, that means you were lazy and self-indulgent, while only the wealthy have proved their moral worth by the size of their bank accounts. So when someone says something like that, you can be pretty sure he’s expressing his actual beliefs.
And that idea is woven through the Republicans’ tax bill. As Jared Bernstein points out, “The tax plan is written in such a way as to favor asset-based incomes, passive business investments and inherited wealth, and to penalize, once it’s fully phased in, those foolish enough to depend on their paychecks.”
Republicans would no doubt counter that any time you reduce taxes, you increase the incentives for work. But it’s important to remember that if you’re a regular wage-earning American, this bill is as likely to increase your taxes as decrease them.According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’ official scorekeeper on tax issues, every income group under $75,000 a year will on average see a tax increase by 2027. And while many of tax cuts that individuals at lower incomes might benefit from phase out over the course of the next decade, the cuts that most help corporations and the wealthy are permanent. All that is why, as Ryan Grim points out, while the bill has a net cost of $1.5 trillion, it actually cuts $6 trillion in some taxes but increases taxes in other ways by $4.5 trillion.
To be fair, the tax code already favors investments over work; Republicans merely want to reinforce and extend that characteristic. While they often lecture about the “dignity of work” when they’re proposing to take away safety net programs that aid those in need, they are doing little or nothing to change the tax code so that it does more to encourage work. Right now, wage income (i.e., money you work for) gets taxed at a higher rate than investment income (i.e., money you make when your money makes you more money). The salutary effects of labor on an individual’s spirit apparently only operate on the grubby lower classes, while the wealthy should be honored and rewarded for their ability to watch their portfolios grow.
Those are value judgments, rooted in how Republicans tend to view the worth of different people. They operate on the presumption that the economic system is fair, and the results of that system provide a measure of different people’s virtue. If you’re rich — even if you got rich by choosing the right parents — they presume that you deserve to be taxed as lightly as possible, while if you’re in need of the kinds of help we offer low-income people, then it reflects a moral failing. If we give you any help at all, it should be as grudging as possible, accompanied by stern lectures and even rituals of humiliation such as drug tests.
Their tax bill, and their upcoming assault on the safety net, will weave these principles more deeply into our laws. And these principles are their real rationale; ignore all the practical claims they make about the explosion of economic growth these tax cuts will supposedly produce, and how the benefits will trickle down to everyone, and how it will all pay for itself. Those arguments are transparently bogus. A recent survey of 38 prominent economists found that only one said the tax bill would significantly increase growth, and all 38 rejected the claim that the tax cut would pay for itself. Every model not constructed by partisan Republicans shows the tax bill producing at best a modest bump in economic activity, but nothing remotely resembling the skyrocketing growth that Republicans predict.
Confronted with this comprehensive debunking of their practical claims, Republicans are undeterred and undaunted. That’s because they’re driven by a moral imperative, one that says that no matter what effect cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations might have on the economy, it’s just the right thing to do. It rewards the virtuous, and you can tell who the virtuous are by how much money they have. If you’re asking why they wrote the bill the way they did, that’s just about all you need to know.
- FNP143
"Trump Orders Largest National Monument Reduction In U.S. History"
I'm sure the proposed coal mines in this region have nothing to do with this. SMH.
- Utah gets what they voted for, enjoy it retards.GuyFawkes
