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On December 03 2017 05:43 Gorsameth wrote:
Ah yeah speaking of RINO's. Danglers, does the fact that Rand Paul voted for this bill mean that there is now no actual Republicans left in the Republican party?
RINOs are simply the ones that didn't fall in line with Republican voters when they chose Trump. So for example if you opposed debt increases under Obama, but now are voting for them under Trump, you are not a RINO. Your principles are very much in order when you fall in line with Trump.
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On December 03 2017 06:26 Doodsmack wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2017 05:43 Gorsameth wrote:
Ah yeah speaking of RINO's. Danglers, does the fact that Rand Paul voted for this bill mean that there is now no actual Republicans left in the Republican party?
RINOs are simply the ones that didn't fall in line with Republican voters when they chose Trump. So for example if you opposed debt increases under Obama, but now are voting for them under Trump, you are not a RINO. Your principles are very much in order when you fall in line with Trump.
Yeah, that makes sense. It's really unfortunate too, it would be a lot harder to condemn them all along with Trump if they didn't latch onto his ballsack so hard.
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On December 03 2017 05:43 Gorsameth wrote:
Ah yeah speaking of RINO's. Danglers, does the fact that Rand Paul voted for this bill mean that there is now no actual Republicans left in the Republican party?
Who?
User was warned for this post
On December 03 2017 07:27 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2017 06:53 Danglars wrote:On December 03 2017 05:43 Gorsameth wrote:
Ah yeah speaking of RINO's. Danglers, does the fact that Rand Paul voted for this bill mean that there is now no actual Republicans left in the Republican party?
Who? Sorry, I was thinking it was you while it was xDaunt. my apologies. Speaking of RINO's. xDaunt, does the fact that Rand Paul voted for this bill mean that there is now no actual Republicans left in the Republican party?
‘Figgered it was him.
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On December 03 2017 05:30 mozoku wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2017 04:35 IgnE wrote:On December 03 2017 04:00 mozoku wrote:On December 03 2017 01:52 hunts wrote:On December 03 2017 01:35 xDaunt wrote:
The most important and impactful feature of the tax bill is the slashing of corporate tax rates, which needs to happen. Most everything else is a comparative rounding error. All of the hysteria surrounding this bill is grossly unwarranted. And why does the slashing of corporate tax rate need to happen? Or do you just say that because of your "uhm a republican, eye need dis!" mentality? Or do you have a reasonable and for once FACTUAL reason for saying this? The treatment of corporate taxes in the bill isn't as simple as just cutting the tax rate, though that's part of it. The current tax system is 30 years old, which means it was designed for a different economy and corporations have had 30 years to figure out how to play around it. Consequently, the status quo provides (and corporations take advantage of) all sorts of backwards incentives not to invest in the US and to shift intellectual property overseas. Saying "we're at full employment" is sort of a red herring. More investment opportunities still means a more dynamic economy because workers have more choices in employment opportunities, and the employers with the most productive opportunities can pay more to attract workers. You have it fundamentally backward. Investment is totally driven by profitability. A short supply of labor increases labor costs and hurts profitability. There won't simply be "more employment opportunities" because nobody invests in something without a clear idea of whether it will be profitable. This is why your "I'm a statistics expert and I am using simple logic to explain how capitalism works" (while accusing everyone else, mind you, of being ideologically brainwashed) is so ironic. You need to update your analytical ideas toolbox. This doesn't make much sense. The status quo is full employment. If incentives are fixed, more productive opportunities become profitable, and more unproductive opportunities become unprofitable. Laborers shift to productive activities from unproductive ones. That's an upgrade on its own. More to your direct point, because taxes are applied asymmetrically to gains and losses, they disproportionately reduce the incentives to invest in the riskiest (i.e. most productive/profitable) options. Thus, cutting taxes increases investment in projects that are worth paying workers than their currently getting paid. Both the workers and the investors win relative to the status quo, though a larger share of the win does go to the investor on average. People invest in stuff they're not sure is going to be profitable all the time. Isn't that basically a description of a VC's day-to-day? In finance, that's what the term risk means. Uncertainty of returns (i.e. profitability). Sometimes the variance is such that the probability of profitablity is small, but the potential payout is such that it makes the risk worth it. If you have the risk appetite, it makes sense to invest in those opportunities. The CAPM (i.e. theory that equates risk and profitability) is a pretty fundamental theorem of finance, and has been empirically confirmed in many ways. GH tried to dismiss it with his next-level buzzphrase "people aren't rational", but that's an oversimplification. It's true that, to an extent, people aren't. But the fact that the CAPM exists and is a fundamental principle of modern finance (i.e. is profitable) is proof that the assumptions are true to at least a reasonable extent. That doesn't conflict with the fact that behavioral economics can be valuable for the x% extent to which the assumptions aren't fulfilled. Show nested quote +
The irony is doubled because your rationale for the corporate tax overhaul is that it is 30 years old and "outdated" but you still believe that capitalism fundamentally operates in the same way as it did 150 years ago. Arguably, 300 years ago, when America had a labor shortage, a vast frontier with untapped natural resources, and established and growing(!) markets to sell new products, your argument might have had some truth in it. Now you are just operating on blind faith, without even the benefit of having read and synthesized the fundamental insights (Adam Smith, Hayek, etc.) from which your "logical" arguments derive.
I never said the principles of capitalism changed. Globalization has provided opportunities to abuse the tax code that people couldn't foresee in 1987.
"The status quo is full employment" is a sentence that demands parsing in a number of dimensions. It's either a tautological truism or a disingenuous attempt to sweep real non-idealities under the rug so as to avoid dealing with them. The point is that in an economy like ours, where unemployment is low, the reserve labor force is also low, and demand is at a local maximum.
Maybe it wasn't clear in my post but when I was talking about "profitability" I was talking about expected profitability based on perceived risk. The expected return on any investment goes down when the cost of labor goes up. Of course, in your preferred interpretation, the increase in the concentration of capital leads to risky, innovative investment strategies where some productivity advance or revolutionary product allows a new competitor to outcompete existing market producers, and everyone wins. That's the dynamism of capitalism, something which Marx recognized and admired. But that interpretation requires conditions of "real competition" as opposed to non-existent "perfect competition," and currently-existing "oligopolistic competition." As Anwar Shaikh says, "Real competition is war. Perfect competition is ballet." In war, increasing capital concentration leads precisely to the elimination of competitors and the subsequent collection of near-monopoly profits. As I linked earlier, the current economy is dominated by big firms with little incentive to invest more capital for decreasing marginal returns. There are massive barriers to entry in most markets, made worse by intellectual property regimes which favor big competitors, scanty antitrust enforcement, and the complexity of financial transactions favoring large firms. This makes sense when you think of "real competition" as war, where competitors compete not just in the realm of productive labor strategies, but across all political and social dimensions.
This is all made worse by the fact that we are already in conditions of high capital concentration (i.e. inequality), stagnant wage growth, and near-monopolistic profits, all of which depress demand for new products. As I've said multiple times, most of your arguments ignore the lessons of the 70s stagflation era, and simply assume that innovation and productivity increases, by themselves, lead to growth, without considering the second step of the M-C-M' cycle. There is simply no evidence that the slow growth in the EU, or to a lesser extent, in the US, is due to insufficient investment capital. You haven't provided any. Instead you just keep pointing to simplistic, overly idealized libertarian arguments, while making vague and mostly irrelevant gestures towards CAPM theory.
P.S. I know you didn't say "capitalism has changed." Reread my post. I accused you of saying precisely the opposite: "Capitalism hasn't changed in 150 years."
Edit: I don't even really like the term "full employment." Kwark used it, not me. I might argue that, given current corporate profitability, and given the reality of wage stagnation (at least relative to corporate profitability), if we are at something that could be called "full employment" then we are seeing what basically amounts to class warfare between capital holders and wage earners. "Rational" capital holders, seeing the need to maintain a certain level of profitability, have opted to pursue monopoly strategies where they can maintain wages and demand at a preset level while optimizing profitability. This has led to cash hoarding and stock market inflation rather than sharing the wealth (i.e. reducing profitability slightly to boost demand and continue the cycle) or ruthlessly reducing wages relative to productivity (which, while it disciplines labor and allows capital to maintain a certain profitability, reduces demand and risks political turmoil). Just think about the visceral response to "immigration" by a large segment of the Western population. Immigration threatens wages. There also seems to be a lot of "all or nothing" investment in which money is piling into tech companies and places like Amazon which are essentially positioning themselves to be unchallengeable monopoly profit collectors for the foreseeable future over vast market spaces.
Maybe the real coup would be to give Jeff Bezos all the money he asks for, then when Amazon has ushered in a brand new age of material wealth, break the whole thing up and nationalize it, to spread the wealth. The whole thing is of course complicated by the fact that a lot of wage earners have their retirement savings tied up in mutual funds (and by the fact that the majority of Americans have essentially no retirement savings).
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On December 03 2017 06:53 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2017 05:43 Gorsameth wrote:
Ah yeah speaking of RINO's. Danglers, does the fact that Rand Paul voted for this bill mean that there is now no actual Republicans left in the Republican party?
Who?
Sorry, I was thinking it was you while it was xDaunt. my apologies.
Speaking of RINO's. xDaunt, does the fact that Rand Paul voted for this bill mean that there is now no actual Republicans left in the Republican party?
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United States43197 Posts
On December 03 2017 05:08 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2017 04:59 Slaughter wrote:On December 03 2017 04:50 KwarK wrote:
Church tithes are also effectively no longer tax deductible for most Americans. That seems like a weird thing to include from Republicans. Quick google search says that faith groups and charities were concerned even back in October that doubling the standard deduction would discourage itemizing, which would presumably provide less incentive to donate. So it doesn't look like they ripped a deduction away.
The exemption and deduction are very different things which serve very different purposes.
The exemption is nothing more than a variable size 0% bracket linked to family size that exists under the other brackets. Logically you want that to be as high as reasonably possible and linked to cost of living, it exists to make sure that grocery income isn't getting taxed. Currently it's set at $4,050 tax free dollars per household member.
The deduction is a completely different animal. The deduction exists to limit the tax penalties on socially positive expenses by allowing you to recover the taxes you paid on those expenses at your marginal tax rate. To reduce the cost of compliance you're allowed to assume $6,350 of socially positive expenses at the moment without providing proof. So you get taxes back at your marginal rate on the greater of $6,350 or what you can prove (with a bunch of bullshit Schedule A ceilings, floors, and other rules).
What this effectively means is that you "win" by having as few actually socially positive expenditures (charitable donations, paying for your own healthcare etc) as possible, giving you the biggest possible difference between your assumed $6,350 and what you actually spent. And you "lose" by having those expenditures at an amount near the assumed deduction, for example socially positive deductible expenditures of $6,400 would net you an additional refund of $12.50 ($50 * 25% tax bracket) over spending $0.
This tax plan abolishes the 0% bracket created by the exemptions. Now you're getting taxed on the poverty level living expenses with no allowance for family size etc. And it repays you by increasing the amount you can "win" by not making socially positive expenditures from $6,350 * your marginal rate to $12,000 * your marginal rate.
What this means is that for anyone outside the 1% (where clearing $12k is a lot easier) most things just aren't deductible anymore.
Republicans like to say that the tax code is too complicated and that having exemptions + deductions is too hard but there's a very good reason it was built the way it was.
Probably the most obvious example of who this will hurt is anyone who regularly donates to charity (people who tithe at their church for example). But paying for your own healthcare expenses, paying state and local taxes, and a few things related to home ownership are all getting penalized.
The impact of that penalty decreases as the amount gets higher, someone who previously donated $13,000 goes from having a tax refund of $1,663 ((13,000-6,350) * assumed 25% tax rate) to $250 ((13,000-12,000) * assumed 25% tax rate). That's a 85% reduction in the tax benefit of charitable contributions for that person. Whereas someone who previously donated $130,000 goes from having a tax refund of $48,965 ((130,000-6,350) * assumed 39.6% tax rate) to $46,728 ((130,000-12,000) * assumed 39.6% tax rate). Their reduction is just 4% in tax benefit.
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On December 03 2017 07:58 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2017 05:08 Introvert wrote:On December 03 2017 04:59 Slaughter wrote:On December 03 2017 04:50 KwarK wrote:
Church tithes are also effectively no longer tax deductible for most Americans. That seems like a weird thing to include from Republicans. Quick google search says that faith groups and charities were concerned even back in October that doubling the standard deduction would discourage itemizing, which would presumably provide less incentive to donate. So it doesn't look like they ripped a deduction away. The exemption and deduction are very different things which serve very different purposes. The exemption is nothing more than a variable size 0% bracket linked to family size that exists under the other brackets. Logically you want that to be as high as reasonably possible and linked to cost of living, it exists to make sure that grocery income isn't getting taxed. Currently it's set at $4,050 tax free dollars per household member. The deduction is a completely different animal. The deduction exists to limit the tax penalties on socially positive expenses by allowing you to recover the taxes you paid on those expenses at your marginal tax rate. To reduce the cost of compliance you're allowed to assume $6,350 of socially positive expenses at the moment without providing proof. So you get taxes back at your marginal rate on the greater of $6,350 or what you can prove (with a bunch of bullshit Schedule A ceilings, floors, and other rules). What this effectively means is that you "win" by having as few actually socially positive expenditures (charitable donations, paying for your own healthcare etc) as possible, giving you the biggest possible difference between your assumed $6,350 and what you actually spent. And you "lose" by having those expenditures at an amount near the assumed deduction, for example socially positive deductible expenditures of $6,400 would net you an additional refund of $12.50 ($50 * 25% tax bracket) over spending $0. This tax plan abolishes the 0% bracket created by the exemptions. Now you're getting taxed on the poverty level living expenses with no allowance for family size etc. And it repays you by increasing the amount you can "win" by not making socially positive expenditures from $6,350 * your marginal rate to $12,000 * your marginal rate. What this means is that for anyone outside the 1% (where clearing $12k is a lot easier) most things just aren't deductible anymore. Republicans like to say that the tax code is too complicated and that having exemptions + deductions is too hard but there's a very good reason it was built the way it was. Tithers are one group that is getting fucked hard here.
If I get the chance I'll pm you later or respond to this directly, can't atm. I will just point again to places the NYT and other institutions that have talked about who wins and who loses already.
edit: and lots of people lose, but not most of the middle, it would seem.
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United States43197 Posts
On December 03 2017 08:27 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2017 07:58 KwarK wrote:On December 03 2017 05:08 Introvert wrote:On December 03 2017 04:59 Slaughter wrote:On December 03 2017 04:50 KwarK wrote:
Church tithes are also effectively no longer tax deductible for most Americans. That seems like a weird thing to include from Republicans. Quick google search says that faith groups and charities were concerned even back in October that doubling the standard deduction would discourage itemizing, which would presumably provide less incentive to donate. So it doesn't look like they ripped a deduction away. The exemption and deduction are very different things which serve very different purposes. The exemption is nothing more than a variable size 0% bracket linked to family size that exists under the other brackets. Logically you want that to be as high as reasonably possible and linked to cost of living, it exists to make sure that grocery income isn't getting taxed. Currently it's set at $4,050 tax free dollars per household member. The deduction is a completely different animal. The deduction exists to limit the tax penalties on socially positive expenses by allowing you to recover the taxes you paid on those expenses at your marginal tax rate. To reduce the cost of compliance you're allowed to assume $6,350 of socially positive expenses at the moment without providing proof. So you get taxes back at your marginal rate on the greater of $6,350 or what you can prove (with a bunch of bullshit Schedule A ceilings, floors, and other rules). What this effectively means is that you "win" by having as few actually socially positive expenditures (charitable donations, paying for your own healthcare etc) as possible, giving you the biggest possible difference between your assumed $6,350 and what you actually spent. And you "lose" by having those expenditures at an amount near the assumed deduction, for example socially positive deductible expenditures of $6,400 would net you an additional refund of $12.50 ($50 * 25% tax bracket) over spending $0. This tax plan abolishes the 0% bracket created by the exemptions. Now you're getting taxed on the poverty level living expenses with no allowance for family size etc. And it repays you by increasing the amount you can "win" by not making socially positive expenditures from $6,350 * your marginal rate to $12,000 * your marginal rate. What this means is that for anyone outside the 1% (where clearing $12k is a lot easier) most things just aren't deductible anymore. Republicans like to say that the tax code is too complicated and that having exemptions + deductions is too hard but there's a very good reason it was built the way it was. Tithers are one group that is getting fucked hard here. If I get the chance I'll pm you later or respond to this directly, can't atm. I will just point again to places the NYT and other institutions that have talked about who wins and who loses already. edit: and lots of people lose, but not most of the middle, it would seem.
Thanks. FYI I really appreciate your responses.
It's too soon to say exactly how much people will win and lose, especially because right now we don't even know the tax brackets (house bill increases bottom bracket to 12% for example, senate bill does not). But there are a bunch of causes for concern, including this issue, non child <18 dependents, and from my perspective educational benefits (to put it simply, I couldn't have become an accountant under this tax plan).
But I did think it was important to explain why we currently have exemptions and deductions, rather than a combined system. People who aren't tax nerds may not understand why the system has two different ways of reducing taxable income. This rant was largely intended to say "the people who made the current system knew what they were doing and the people saying they're reducing the complexity also know exactly what they're doing".
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I was about to comment something earlier but was unsure of the legality of firing someone you know lied to the fbi without informing them of it. But I had completely forgot he fired Comey over it too. This is 100% obstruction of justice.
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On December 03 2017 07:16 IgnE wrote:"The status quo is full employment" is a sentence that demands parsing in a number of dimensions. It's either a tautological truism or a disingenuous attempt to sweep real non-idealities under the rug so as to avoid dealing with them. The point is that in an economy like ours, where unemployment is low, the reserve labor force is also low, and demand is at a local maximum. Maybe it wasn't clear in my post but when I was talking about "profitability" I was talking about expected profitability based on perceived risk. The expected return on any investment goes down when the cost of labor goes up. Of course, in your preferred interpretation, the increase in the concentration of capital leads to risky, innovative investment strategies where some productivity advance or revolutionary product allows a new competitor to outcompete existing market producers, and everyone wins. That's the dynamism of capitalism, something which Marx recognized and admired. But that interpretation requires conditions of "real competition" as opposed to non-existent "perfect competition," and currently-existing "oligopolistic competition." As Anwar Shaikh says, "Real competition is war. Perfect competition is ballet." In war, increasing capital concentration leads precisely to the elimination of competitors and the subsequent collection of near-monopoly profits. As I linked earlier, the current economy is dominated by big firms with little incentive to invest more capital for decreasing marginal returns. There are massive barriers to entry in most markets, made worse by intellectual property regimes which favor big competitors, scanty antitrust enforcement, and the complexity of financial transactions favoring large firms. This makes sense when you think of "real competition" as war, where competitors compete not just in the realm of productive labor strategies, but across all political and social dimensions. This is all made worse by the fact that we are already in conditions of high capital concentration (i.e. inequality), stagnant wage growth, and near-monopolistic profits, all of which depress demand for new products. As I've said multiple times, most of your arguments ignore the lessons of the 70s stagflation era, and simply assume that innovation and productivity increases, by themselves, lead to growth, without considering the second step of the M-C-M' cycle. There is simply no evidence that the slow growth in the EU, or to a lesser extent, in the US, is due to insufficient investment capital. You haven't provided any. Instead you just keep pointing to simplistic, overly idealized libertarian arguments, while making vague and mostly irrelevant gestures towards CAPM theory.
I agree with some of this. I think anti-competitive monopolies should be regulated. I also agree that current IP law seems like it needs reforming, though I'm not an expert in that area and can't comment on how feasible or effective any changes would be. I'm not convinced it's good for consumers in the long-term that Google and Facebook are buying potential competitive threats, but I think that's a bit more complicated--a company's advancement in Big Data leads to a virtuous cycle where strength naturally breeds strength.
On the other hand, I get the feeling that some of your information is a little dated, and some of it just incorrect. At least in the US, capital investment has picked significantly in the past year or so. Growth is looking like it's picking up as well. I haven't seen much evidence that businesses are extracting higher rents than they have in the past. In fact, in many industries (ridesharing and retail most notably) the opposite is happening.
I don't see how this directly refutes what I'm saying either. I'll assume for a minute that your premises are correct (low capital investment, high profits, high cash on hand). You seem to be arguing that capital is currently cheap and growth is slow, so solutions that focus on the capital side are looking at it it the wrong way. But, at least from a tax perspective, I don't think that's necessarily correct. As I've alluded to, lowering taxes means higher expected returns, and the effect is most pronounced for the riskiest and most productive investments. So a tax cut on investment returns and/or corporate taxes should be effective.
There's maybe an argument to made (and I believe you're trying to make it) that an alternate approach would be to try to redistribute the profits that are supposedly destined to sit as cash on corporate balance sheets to the middle class in an attempt to jumpstart demand, but that fails on several fronts. First, it doesn't appear the premises are true. Second, it's unclear how such a strategy would be more effective than a tax cut--especially considering investors are more prone to, well, investing than consuming.
To be clear, I'm not a huge fan of the individual tax cut piece of this bill in general (or at least it being as large as it is). I like its handling of corporate taxes better than the status quo, and I think there's arguments to be made that a tax burden shift away from the wealthy isn't necessarily a bad idea.
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On December 03 2017 04:44 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2017 03:51 warding wrote:On December 03 2017 02:04 GreenHorizons wrote:On December 03 2017 01:51 kollin wrote:On December 03 2017 01:46 Sermokala wrote:On December 03 2017 01:35 xDaunt wrote:
The most important and impactful feature of the tax bill is the slashing of corporate tax rates, which needs to happen. Most everything else is a comparative rounding error. All of the hysteria surrounding this bill is grossly unwarranted. But xdaunt if they don't pass a budget at all for the ten years the worst thing that will happen is that the debt will go up by a whole trillion dollars. That means america will be a third world nation and civil war will happen. Don't forget great depression guaranteed if they don't pass a new budget for the next few years for some reason. Is it not 1.5 trillion to the budget deficit, which is effectively tripling it? I'm reading it as "Will add ~1.5 trillion to the deficit by 2027" not the debt as well. https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/115th-congress-2017-2018/costestimate/reconciliationrecommendationssfc.pdfEDIT: The point is to use the deficit to justify social cuts anyway. Create the crisis and demand we solve it their way. Then the next Bill Clinton is supposed to oblige them again. It's to the debt. Adding 1.4t to the deficit would be insane. The macro impact of the bill really us not as large as people make it. I'm no pro at reading this stuff but... Show nested quote +...enacting the legislation would reduce revenues by about $1,633 billion and decrease outlays by $219 billion over the 2018-2027 period, leading to an increase in the deficit of $1,414 billion over the next 10 years. A portion of the changes in revenues would be from Social Security payroll taxes, which are off-budget. Excluding the estimated $27 billion increase in off-budget revenues over the next 10 years, JCT estimates that the legislation would increase on-budget deficits by about $1,441 billion over the period from 2018 to 2027. www.cbo.gov
You are not telling full story.
In the exact same article the JCT estimates that the bill will result in an extra 1 trillion deficit,because the bill would lead to 0.8% higher growth which would increase tax revenue.
If trump would add 1 trillion to the debt he would still do better then Obama who also added 1 trillion to the debt,because due to inflation 1 trillion in 8 years is less then it was when Obama was president.
But yes it is a lot of debt,shared by all americans and their earning power as collateral.
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On December 03 2017 03:51 warding wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2017 02:04 GreenHorizons wrote:On December 03 2017 01:51 kollin wrote:On December 03 2017 01:46 Sermokala wrote:On December 03 2017 01:35 xDaunt wrote:
The most important and impactful feature of the tax bill is the slashing of corporate tax rates, which needs to happen. Most everything else is a comparative rounding error. All of the hysteria surrounding this bill is grossly unwarranted. But xdaunt if they don't pass a budget at all for the ten years the worst thing that will happen is that the debt will go up by a whole trillion dollars. That means america will be a third world nation and civil war will happen. Don't forget great depression guaranteed if they don't pass a new budget for the next few years for some reason. Is it not 1.5 trillion to the budget deficit, which is effectively tripling it? I'm reading it as "Will add ~1.5 trillion to the deficit by 2027" not the debt as well. https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/115th-congress-2017-2018/costestimate/reconciliationrecommendationssfc.pdfEDIT: The point is to use the deficit to justify social cuts anyway. Create the crisis and demand we solve it their way. Then the next Bill Clinton is supposed to oblige them again. It's to the debt. Adding 1.4t to the deficit would be insane. The macro impact of the bill really us not as large as people make it.
yes its debt,the article phrased it a bit weird.
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On December 03 2017 09:57 Excludos wrote:https://twitter.com/matthewamiller/status/937009631662104578I was about to comment something earlier but was unsure of the legality of firing someone you know lied to the fbi without informing them of it. But I had completely forgot he fired Comey over it too. This is 100% obstruction of justice.
The thing here is that since Yates warned the WH that the intercepts on Flynn showed that he had lied, the Trump admin could say that’s how they knew he lied. Problem is that before firing Flynn trump asked Comey to drop the investigation. Their public explanation for why they fired Flynn (that he lied to the administration) was a total lie because Flynn was acting on orders at all times when he was talking to the Russians. I am not quite sure how to sort all this out.
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are the JCT numbers credible?
what kind of votes were had on JCT approving the numbers they found?
While the CBO does good work, I don't know enoug habout the JCT to say; and if the CBO is merely being forced to accept the JCT numbers and those numbers are bad, then it means nothing.
and the republicans have a history of making up inflated BS numbers for the economic growth caused by tax cuts.
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Its been a bad couple months for mainstream media. PBS and C-Span are gonna ending up taking over at this rate.
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I know there's pressure to be first, but honestly that's a massive enough fuck up to hurt the whole story. It's dangerous to get that far ahead. I mean, they apparently weren't that far off - candidate vs president-elect, so I can see how the mixup happened, but that's the whole reason you verify shit and double check what you have written.
Four weeks suspension without pay isn't nothing, but I feel like other people are equally to blame and it's not really that much of a punishment. It takes more than a single person to make this sort of mistake.
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EPT
