US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5176

On August 23 2025 00:11 KwarK wrote:

Please go ahead and explain how the treasury can receive a dollar paid in tariffs and yet Americans only pay $0.80 or whatever. You may have discovered an infinite money glitch.

On August 23 2025 00:32 oBlade wrote:

Most people do try to analyze/measure passthrough. For example, a company is dropshipping widgets they import at $1, and have operating costs of $0.50 per widget, and selling them for $3. Blumpf announces a 100% widget tariff. This raises their costs from $1.50 to $2.50. They cut $0.20 out of their operating costs per widget by firing their social media manager and raise prices to $3.80 instead of tacking the entire buck on and making it $4. Only 80% has been passed through to the consumer.

"But the company is Americans too." Yeah. Then passthrough is 100% by definition all the time and there's no point to the field of economics. It's solved.

Nonetheless, if Gavin Newsom announces a 99% tax on shiny top hats, or if Sanders announces a 99% tax on Wall Street, as part of a 2028 platform, I don't think anyone would characterize that as them bragging about "taxing Americans."

On August 23 2025 00:42 KwarK wrote:

So of the one dollar 80 cents comes from Americans and 20 cents comes from the social media manager. Presumably you can guess my next question.

On August 23 2025 00:51 KwarK wrote:
You're genuinely trying to convince us that companies had all this extra money lying around which they could have just kept or reinvested or paid out to shareholders but until now they've been burning it by paying some soy they/them social media manager who doesn't even really count and so when Trump demands money then it won't hurt real Americans, it'll just hurt that guy. You could have said that they would cut QA or capital expenditures or a million other real things that people who have actually worked in manufacturing know get cut when times are hard. But no, it's the imaginary social media manager.

On August 23 2025 01:08 oBlade wrote:

Your characterization of the social media manager in the example is completely your own addition, for the record. He is imaginary because the widgets and company are imaginary just like the QA and capital expenditures would be imaginary because it was a hypothetical.

Have you really not seen the concept of consumer passthrough before? You seem like you should have encountered it at some point. Because what you say is exactly correct. When companies are doing well and have profits and squeakly clean QA and are sitting on cash and reinvesting, they can afford to absorb more of any tax and so don't pass on the full cost to their consumers. They have margins that can absorb more. This is why people want to tax companies that are killing it more than ones that aren't, and annihilating their competition, like Costco or Walmart or Amazon, instead of companies that are going bankrupt. Because they are the ones who can afford it.

The FBI searched former national security adviser John Bolton's home in Maryland on Friday as part of a “national security investigation in search of classified records,” a source familiar with the matter confirmed to NBC News.

An FBI official said in a statement that the agency was "conducting court authorized activity in the area. There is no threat to public safety.”

The agency declined to comment further on the search. Bolton, who lives in Bethesda, did not immediately respond to NBC News' request for comment.

In a post on X early Friday, FBI Director Kash Patel wrote, "NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission."

Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino also appeared to refer to the search in posts on X.

"America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always," Bondi wrote early Friday.

“Public corruption will not be tolerated,” Bongino wrote.

On August 23 2025 01:32 oBlade wrote:
By that logic, every tax rate should be 0% because it's stealing money that would be reinvested in the economy and generate returns for businesses over time. This is until you realize the US is a country, not just a group of corporations, and not even just an economy.

On August 23 2025 01:35 GreenHorizons wrote:
So the FBI raided John Bolton's home and office for classified materials



www.nbcnews.com

On August 23 2025 01:44 KwarK wrote:

You seem to have forgotten your position and instead of defending it you're attacking a strawman.

Your position was that when Trump raises money through tariffs the money doesn't all come from Americans.
I challenged this because for every dollar received a dollar must be sent. That's accounting 101. It has to come from somewhere.

You then clarified that what you meant was that a dollar in taxes is paid but it's not all paid by Americans, some of it is paid for by imaginary Brad the social media manager whose job provides zero value and can be cut without harming any real Americans. For context, Brad is not considered a real American and so doesn't count.

I explained that Brad was made up but even within the fantasy he's still an American and therefore the taxes are still paid by Americans.

You abandoned your side of the argument entirely, whether the taxes are paid by Americans, and now arguing that taxes exist I think? I don't dispute that taxes exist, they definitely do. No argument there.

On August 23 2025 02:11 oBlade wrote:

Let me break this down some because I must have overestimated somewhere. I'll start with our common axiom that taxes exist and governments levy them.

1) In the US, they are largely paid by Americans, but not entirely, because foreigners and foreign companies operating in America are subject to American law, but for the sake of brevity that can be smoothed over.

2) Therefore the fact that "Americans" pay a tax is a trivial criticism of it. Trivial as in to nowhere. There are Americans we want to tax more, and Americans we want to tax less. If the IRS collects $1 from Elon Musk, then Elon Musk paid it. This isn't bad, because it's our goal, we want him to pay it. If you put a $1000 tax on trillion dollar car companies, and the IRS collects $1000 from Tesla, Tesla customers may not have paid the entire $1000. Therefore the fact that Tesla, or its customers, pay indeed any share of the $1000, cannot be an argument against it per se otherwise it invalidates taxes entirely. This is why we're allowed to and do tax companies.

+ Show Spoiler +

3) One such tax on companies is tariffs. For this, I will just say you simply need to familiarize yourself with the concept of passthrough to consumer. In Trump's first term, all estimates point to less than 50% of the costs of tariffs being passed to the consumer in most cases. https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/research-department-working-paper/2019/tariff-passthrough-at-the-border-and-at-the-store-evidence-from-us-trade-policy.aspx

That means more than 50% is absorbed by people other than consumers, in this case, people who are engaging in a disproportionate importing of things into the US instead of exporting from it, which we may want to discourage, putting them in the "Elon Musk" category of people we have a reason for wanting to tax more.