Sunday, April 14, 2019

Tax Bill Winners and Losers

CNN Here's who's winning under Trump's tax law

I think I lost some this year, but I am more worried about our kids.  A whole society based on:
  • spending more
  • paying less
  • running up the debt
  • passing the burden forward
is definitely not good for their futures.



12 comments:

  1. If debt mattered, we wouldn't have given ourselves the largest tax cut in history.

    --Hiram

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  2. In terms of passing the burden forward, consider our kids. They get to go to schools they didn't pay for. The benefit gets passed forward too.

    In a society where rich people are willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars just to get their kids into USC, I don't think the burden of the national debt is all that significant.

    --Hiram

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  3. Hiram,
    Your parent's / grand parent's generations provided free education, the interstate system, peace in the USA and so many other benefits to our generations while reducing or maintaining the national debt.

    Yet you have a hard time acknowledging that we should be doing this for our future generations. I always find that puzzling?

    And please remember that it is the spending that is problematic as well as the taxes.

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  4. If it is a spending problem why does the GOP never cut spending when they are in power? They had 2 years to pass spending cuts along with their tax cut, yet they never do it. I think it is because they know the public does not support spending cuts.

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  5. I don’t know enough about what cuts the GOP could make without 60 votes.

    But I do agree with you that the GOP politicians and voters are irresponsible.

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  6. Of course with the DEMs shifting to supporting full blown DEM Socialism...

    The choices are getting pretty bad. 😁

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  7. "I don’t know enough about what cuts the GOP could make without 60 votes."

    They passed the tax cuts using reconciliation, and could have done the same for spending cuts.

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  8. "The choices are getting pretty bad. "

    Maybe the choices wouldn't look so bad if you accurately described them, Mr. Fact-Based Analyst.

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  9. It seems they tried but had defectors, and the DEMs certainly did not want to limit spending.

    As for choices...

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  10. "It seems they tried but had defectors"

    If you read your own link, you'll see that they never in fact seriously tried. Not once did House Republicans ever produce a set of appropriations bills that met their budget targets. (Hell, they never even passed a *single* appropriation bill for any department that did so!)

    "DEMs certainly did not want to limit spending."

    Again, you're placing your ideology ahead of the facts. The only times in recent U.S. history where we have seen spending cuts of any magnitude have been during Democratic administrations.

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  11. I would suggest, though, that the somewhat leftward shift we're seeing in the Democrats is actually the appropriate response the shifting of the Republican Party. There's no incentive right now for Democrats to seek centrist policies because the current crop of Republicans aren't going to sign on to them.

    In 2008, both John McCain and Barack Obama ran on instituting cap-and-trade as a step towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Once Obama became President, McCain flip-flopped on cap-and-trade and the rest of the GOP went into denial about whether climate change is real or not. Cap-and-trade is not some sort of socialist fantasy, it's a centrist, market-based approach to controlling pollution.

    The ACA is in that same vein, and Republicans have been engaged in a decade-long freakout over it while having no solution of their own.

    As a person who is not on the far left of the Democratic party, I tend to like market-based solutions. But those policies are complicated, they often times create winners and losers, and there's no one on the other side to work with on these policies now. And even if we Democrats do get to put in a policy of our own, Republicans will work to undermine it just to "own the libs".

    So I totally understand the appeal of saying "OK, we're done trying to make the ACA better. Let's go to Medicare for All." or "forget cap-and-trade, bring on the Green New Deal" or "Stop messing with the EITC. Just raise the minimum wage." Those policies are easy to explain and they have broad appeal. Poor Bret Baier probably had a heart attack when he saw how many people supported M4A during Bernie's town hall.

    Democrats are going to have to fight some of the blunt force Republicans have used in recent years with some of their own, and then maybe we'll see things settle back into an equilibrium again.

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  12. Sean,
    Unfortunately there is a lot more room to move to the Left than to the Right.

    As for who is pro domestic spending and regulations... I am pretty sure that is the DEMs.

    Now who is pro Defense spending and anti-regulations... I am pretty sure that is the GOPers.

    Now I agree that the GOP is a bunch of hypocrites in many ways. But I am sure not going to have faith in giving the DEMs the purse strings. Thankfully gridlock is back in place. :-)

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