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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:14:18 GMT
Republicons: Throwing momma from the train to throwing grandma under the train. Nothing good will come out of this tax cut unless of course you are Republicon or the 1% campaign donor.Former Treasury Secretary Lew Says Tax Cuts Will Leave the U.S. BrokeMarcus Bensasson 6 hours ago
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said the Trump administration’s decision to add a significant amount of debt through last year’s tax legislation is leaving the country broke.
“It’s a ticking time bomb in terms of the debt,” Lew said in a Bloomberg Radio interview withTom Keene andJonathan Ferro. “You cannot run a fiscal policy by spending trillions of dollars you don’t have at a time that the economy is doing well.”
Having chosen to make tax policy without including Democrats in any of the conversation, now the administration probably can’t rally Republicans in Congress to do the basic business of government, such as making sure the country doesn’t default on debt and children don’t get thrown off health insurance, he said.
“The next shoe to drop is going to be an attack on the most vulnerable in our society,” Lew said. “How are we going to pay for the deficit caused by the tax cut? We are going to see proposals to cut health insurance for poor people, to take basic food support away from poor people, to attack Medicare and Social Security. One could not have made up a more cynical strategy.”
“What we’ve seen is a tax cut that spends money we don’t have to have very concentrated benefits for global corporations and the top 1 percent, and it’s leaving us broke,” according to Lew. |
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:14:44 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:15:39 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:16:01 GMT
My response to the above is this: Actually, Trump is smart on this, or at the very least, cagey enough to have conned middle-class voters who were stupid enough to have voted for him. |
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:16:25 GMT
It's an outrage. Now when the shit hits the budget shortfall fan of almost 2 trillion dollars our economy will collapse OR grandma will have to be thrown off the train along with social security and medicare. But as long as the wealthy Republiconservative campaign donors get their extra chalet in France and new yachts all is ok and the corporate whore republicans in power have job security as the brain dead reptilians are true FOX believers and will fall for anything.
Paul Ryan: Secretary Getting $1.50 More A Week Shows Effect Of GOP Tax CutsHuffPost Daniel Marans,HuffPost 13 hours ago .
really wants you to know how great the Republican tax cuts are.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) really wants you to know how great the Republican tax cuts are.
Worried that the partisan Nunes memo released Friday will undermine the FBI’s ability to do its job? Ryan is happy to remind you, ”The tax cuts are working.”
On Saturday, Ryan outdid himself again with a tweet bragging about the extra $1.50 a week that a Pennsylvania secretary is making thanks to the GOP legislation.
“A secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, PA, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week ... she said [that] will more than cover her Costco membership for the year,” Ryan tweeted on Saturday.
(Paul Ryan/Twitter)
The tweet refers to an anecdote about the secretary, Julia Ketchum, in an Associated Press article.
A dollar and 50 cents a week amounts to $78 a year. Although every little bit counts for Americans living paycheck to paycheck, an extra $78 a year is a very small amount of money by any standard.
The tweet predictably drew mockery, and Ryan deleted it Saturday afternoon.
To be fair, the $1.50 figure likely reflects Ketchum’s reduced tax withholding in her paycheck due to lower tax rates. As a result of increases in deductions, including a doubling of the standard deduction, she may also get more money back after filing her 2018 taxes next spring.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) touted the extra $1.50 a week that a secretary would be getting thanks to the tax cut. (Leah Millis/Reuters)
Ketchum’s experience nonetheless exemplifies a fundamental truth about the tax bill: The gains it provides ordinary people pale in comparison to the boost it gives the super-wealthy.
Middle-class households will, on average, see a $930 increase ― or 1.6 percent boost ― in after-tax income thanks to the GOP tax cut, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
By contrast, the top 1 percent of earners ― households making more than $730,000 ― stand to get a 3.4 percent bump, or about $51,000, the Tax Policy Center estimates.
And the TPC projects that the top 0.1 percent of earners, who make $3.4 million a year or more, are due for an extra 2.7 percent, or $193,000.
Notably, other policies more targeted at lower- and middle-income Americans have been shown to provide significant increases in Americans’ hourly take-home pay, as opposed to the boost Ketchum is seeing in her weekly check.
Raising the federal minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour by 2024 would raise pay for almost one-third of American workers, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. The average full-time worker affected by the increase would get a $3,500 raise once the $15 minimum is phased in, the EPI estimates.
Another key avenue for workers seeking higher wages that grow in tandem with their employers’ profits are labor unions. In 2017, the median pay of a unionized worker was 25.6 percent higher than the median pay of a non-union worker, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Yet Ryan and his Republican allies are deeply opposed to increasing the minimum wage or making it easier for labor unions to organize. For example, Ryan supported Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) successful 2011 bid to strip Wisconsin’s public sector workers of their collective bargaining rights.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:16:51 GMT
Older but relevant video when you want to get to Trump and publicons motivations.Published on Aug 22, 2017
The proposed budgets in Congress will make Trump even richer.
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The Trump Organization is the 48th-largest private company in the US, and brought in $9.5 billion in revenue in 2016. But the Trump Organization doesn't pay taxes like a big corporation. It's a special kind of entity called a "pass-through" business.
The designation was originally for small-business owners to bypass corporate taxes and only pay the individual tax rate. Now huge corporations are also taking advantage.
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:17:18 GMT
New Tax Law Benefiting Shareholders More Than Workers So FarHuffPost Arthur Delaney,HuffPost 8 hours ago .
WASHINGTON ― Since President Donald Trump signed the Republican tax bill in December, hundreds of retail companies have announced employee bonuses totaling more than $3 billion, which Republicans have said proves them right that the new law benefits regular Americans.
But so far, companies have thrown a lot more money at their shareholders than at their workers. According to several estimates, firms have announced roughly $200 billion worth of stock buybacks this year, inflating the value of company shares by reducing their supply.
“Stock buybacks are windfalls that drive up the value of investment portfolios for CEOs and high-flyers,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a Senate floor speech this week. “And they’re coming in at a rate 30 times greater than worker bonuses — 30 to one! They’re on pace to double the amount from the first quarter of last year.”
Buybacks are controversial because they can represent a missed opportunity for a company to invest in its own productive capacity or its workers, and it just so happens that executive pay is usually tied to stock performance.
Nevertheless, Republicans told HuffPost that stock buybacks are broadly beneficial to the economy.
“Stock buybacks are attacked as though they are a bad thing but if you look at what ripples through the economy as a result of stock buybacks, you can see that there is a beneficial impact of those in a number of different ways,” Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said Thursday.
“We can argue about whether that’s as good as using the money in some other way, like capital investments, or wage increases, or bonuses, or pension plan funding,” Crapo said. “My hope is that the resources that these companies have as a result of tax relief will be utilized for all of these purposes.”
When companies buy their own shares, the money “gets reallocated through the economy in a more efficient manner,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s how capitalism works.”
But stock ownership is highly concentrated among the wealthiest Americans. The richest 10 percent of stock owners owned 84 percent of all stock in 2016, according a widely cited recent paper on household wealth and the Great Recession.
“I don’t disagree that there are probably people on the high end who own a lot of stock, but there are a lot more investors today than there were 20 years ago,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said.
Companies have increasingly plowed profits into stock buybacks over the past several decades because doing so lines corporate executives’ pockets, argues William Lazonick, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. According to Lazonick’s analysis of the compensation of the 500 highest-paid executives, stock-based gains accounted for 82 percent of their pay in 2015.
″People who are in the business of buying and selling shares are the ones who benefit from buybacks,” Lazonick said.
Democrats said during the tax debate last year that cutting corporate taxes would mainly benefit shareholders — after all, that’s what several corporate executives had said would happen. So when companies like Walmart and Home Depot started announcing bonuses because of the tax law earlier this year, Republicans seized on the news to say Democrats had been wrong.
The wave of bonus stories, which Republicans have touted in daily press releases, may have contributed to an uptick in the tax law’s popularity. According to a HuffPost/YouGov poll, people were twice as likely to have seen news stories about bonuses than buybacks.
Republicans have also pointed to a more direct consequence of the law: small increases to most workers’ paychecks. Since federal income tax is withheld from paychecks, lower tax rates mean less withholding, and therefore more take-home pay. (Though paycheck changes can depend on a variety of factors, including household size.)
But by trumpeting bonuses, Republicans are abandoning what had previously been their main argument for how lower taxes on companies would benefit workers. White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett argued in an October paper that a corporate tax cut would spur capital investment that would make workers more productive. That increased productivity would in turn make workers more valuable, eventually causing wages to rise by about $4,000 annually. Hassett has said the process would take several years.
Last week, Hassett said the surge in buybacks had been spurred mainly by the new law’s discount tax rate on repatriated foreign profits — cash that firms are now bringing home after having stashed it abroad to avoid the higher tax rate under previous law.
“And so with that money coming back, then right now we’re going to have an adjustment where you’ll see probably more dividends than share buybacks than wage increases because that’s cumulative past earnings,” Hassett said.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who wavered in her support of the tax bill partly because it was overly generous to corporations and the wealthy, told HuffPost in November that the purpose of the tax bill was to encourage job creation.
“It is not to encourage stock buybacks, which tend to enrich the executives of a firm,” Collins said. “So that would be disappointing if that was the case.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:17:46 GMT
Quote by ronstadtfanaz: No surprise there. This law will benefit shareholders a hell of a lot more than workers, period! |
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:18:15 GMT
Average Americans would have seen just under $1000 gain based on the tax reform bill. (this doesn't count an actual amount we will all be paying to give the uber elite and wealthy 1.5 trillion in cuts. Wait until that hits the fan.) Well guess what, rising gas prices under Trump will more than take that $1000 away. Not only will we be paying more for gas which will totally erase that cut but we will pay with higher prices for EVERYTHING. These circumstances will have little effect on the uber wealthy who received most of the tax cut. Also, the claim is that Trump's middle east policies are increasing middle east tensions thereby raising oil prices. The problem I have with all this scam is that the US is a net exporter of oil and gas and no matter what happens in the middle east should have NO consequence to us here. It is just an excuse to raise prices. So Trumpublicans are as much to blame as OPEC for what is going on with prices.
and if that isn't bad enough:
Donald Trump Wants to Raise Your Gas Prices
By Nicole Goodkind On 10/26/17 at 12
The Trump administration is floating a 40 percent hike in gas taxes to fund a $1 trillion infrastructure package, a regressive tax that would disproportionately hurt the low- and middle-income Americans who compose the president's political base.
Gary Cohn, whom President Donald Trump appointed as director of the National Economic Council, raised the idea when he met Wednesday with a group of moderate Democrats and Republicans called the Problem Solvers Caucus. Cohn reportedly told the group that Congress would have the opportunity to vote for a gas tax increase of 7 cents early next year.
The proposed hike of 7 cents—which would be the first increase in the federal gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993—would raise about $28 million each day, or $10 billion a year from fuel consumers, according to Patrick DeHaan, senior petroleum analyst at GasBuddy.com.
“Tax increases are something that motorists bear directly when they fill up,” he said, adding that the increase would particularly hurt Americans who can’t afford fuel-efficient newer cars.
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:18:42 GMT
Nick Hanauer: 'Radical Inequality is Going to Destroy' Economy
Nick Hanauer on His Banned TED Talk & Why the Middle Class are the Job Creators
Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming | Nick Hanauer
Town Square: Democracy as a Garden
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:19:15 GMT
Now that the GOP got that BIG tax cut for their global elite corporate campaign donors it's PARTY TIME.
Time to cut social security and medicare:
Politics
House GOP plan would cut Medicare, Social Security to balance budget
Washington Post Tue, Jun 19 2:48 AM MST .
Republicans House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) is flanked by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), left, and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), right. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) House Republicans released a budget proposal Tuesday that would balance in nine years — but only by making large cuts to entitlement programs, including Medicare and Social Security, that President Trump has vowed not to touch. The House Budget Committee is aiming to pass the blueprint later this week, but that may be as far as it goes this midterm election year. It’s not clear that GOP leaders will put the document on the House floor for a vote, and even if it were to pass the House, the budget would have little ...
www.washingtonpost.com/?utm_term=.589463965a18
from 2 months ago....NO big surprise this is what they came up with.......
Boyle Slams GOP Plan to Cut Social Security and Medicare
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:20:39 GMT
good and honorable people??? I don't think so....
FURIOUS Congressman Blasts Republicans' Tax Cuts For The Rich
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:21:23 GMT
Like I said, wait until tax time next year to see how popular this giveaway to the wealthy and corporations aka Republiconservative campaign donors is. The warnings I posted about are all coming true. People are being laid off left and right instead of getting raises or new job opportunities. Corporations are buying back stocks instead and are flowing in cash. The wealthy are cleaning up. Any increase in wages that anyone has gotten has been diminished by higher gas and energy costs which translates to higher commodity and food costs. And as predicted congress is trying to pass legislation to cut social security and medicare which most of us have been paying into for decades. Medicaid has already been cut AND now the administration is requiring those on food stamps to work before they qualify. How will single parents and the elderly do that?
There are actually more people on food stamps under Trump than Obama. Of course Obama had to put people on food stamps after REPUBLICONSERVATIVES crashed the economy. What is Trump's excuse? His administration is ONLY changing the food stamp requirements so that he can brag about lower food stamp numbers than Obama. NOT gonna happen. I expect this economy to crash worse than 2008. All indicators are pointing that way.
WHERE IS THE TRICKLE DOWN FROM THE RICH???The Republican tax law is becoming less popular, not moreSix months in, the majority of voters are neutral to negative on the GOP tax cuts.
By Emily Stewart Jun 22, 2018, 10:30am EDT
House Speaker Paul Ryan speaks about the Republican tax bill days before its passage in December 2017. |Mark Wilson/Getty Images
It’s been six months since President Donald Trump signed into law the Republican tax cuts. During that time, the measure appears to have become less popular — not more. The GOP’s big 2018 midterms sales pitch isn’t working out exactly how party leaders thought it would.
According to a Monmouth University poll released this week, just 34 percent of Americans said they approve of the Republican tax reform package, compared to 41 percent who disapprove. That’s down from April, when 40 percent of Americans said they approved of the law and 44 percent did not. In January, respondents were evenly split, with 44 percent saying they approved and another 44 percent voicing disapproval of the plan.
Public opinion on the tax law has “never been positive,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, in a statement accompanying the results, “but potentially growing uncertainty about how American taxpayers will be affected does not seem to be helping the GOP’s prospects in November.”
Broadly, most polling shows the tax law is more disliked than liked by Americans. A recent Quinnipiac poll found 39 percent of respondents approve of the legislation and 46 percent disapprove of it. An Economist/YouGov poll found a smaller but still negative margin, with 38 percent approving and 40 percent not.
A RealClearPolitics average of tax law polling indicates that about 36.1 percent of Americans are on board with the tax measure and 43 percent are not, a nearly 7 percentage point difference.
Americans seem kind of ambivalent about the tax law
It appears that more Americans are becoming uncertain about how they feel about the tax legislation, the Monmouth pollsters noted. Twenty-four percent of respondents to their June poll said they’re not sure how they feel about the law. In January, 13 percent said they didn’t know.
That could be for a lot of reasons. The law is designed to benefit corporations and the richest Americans most. It reduced the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, and the top 1 percent of individual earners are expected to receive about 80 percent of the legislation’s gains.
Many Americans are probably seeing somewhat higher paychecks but not enough for them to notice. There’s polling to back that up: In February, just a quarter of the public reported seeing a change in their paychecks in a Politico/Morning Consult poll. And the real proof in the pudding won’t be evident until tax time in April 2019.
“When they’ll really see the difference is a year from March and April,” said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director for the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told Vox’s Ella Nilsen in April.
While ordinary Americans may not be feeling the law in their lives, corporate America and Wall Street certainly are: Corporate stock buybacks are booming this year, thanks in part to the tax cuts. Companies such as Apple, Cisco, Pepsi, Wells Fargo, and Harley-Davidson have announced major stock repurchase plans this year. And that’s not always translating into a positive impact on their workers: Wells Fargo has been laying off workers, and Harley-Davidson is closing its Kansas City plant.
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:21:51 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2020 20:22:17 GMT
TOLD YOU SO! :Republicans admit they’ll slash Medicare, Social Security to pay for their tax cuts"I do think we need to deal with some of our spending."
Rebekah Entralgo Aug 21, 2018, 1:12 pm
Republicans that supported the trillion dollar Trump tax bill are revealing their true motivations: slashing Medicare and Social Security. (PHOTO Credit: Getty Images)
Slowly but surely, Republicans that supported the trillion dollar Trump tax bill are revealing their true motivations: slashing Medicare and Social Security.
During a Sunday interview with CNBC’s John Harwood, Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH) urged entitlement reform as the deficit continues to balloon as a result of the GOP tax cuts.
“I do think we need to deal with some of our spending,” Stivers said. “We’ve got try to figure out how to spend less.”
Stivers, who also serves as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), is a self-proclaimed “budget hawk” and frequently criticized national debt levels under the Obama administration. Despite his previous trepidation at increasing the deficit, he voted in favor of a costly tax bill that even the White House admitted would not pay for itself over time.
In his interview with CNBC, Stivers admitted this as well saying, “I don’t think that tax cuts, themselves, can grow the economy for 20 or 30 years.”
But Republican politicians did not go into the tax bill vote blind. There were multiple studies released after the bill was drafted that showed massive tax cuts for the wealthy would only add to the deficit.
The conservative-leaning Tax Foundation released a report the week of the tax bill vote that found the GOP bill would lead to a 1.7 percent increase in gross domestic product over the long term and bring in an extra $600 billion in revenue. Even after factoring in that growth, however, the deficit would still total $448 billion over the next decade.
The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation specifically shot down the idea that the bill would pay for itself, stating in analysis on December 11 last year that it would increase federal interest costs by $51 billion over ten years and would cost approximately $1 trillion.
Republicans propose a balanced budget amendment after voting for trillion dollar legislation. (CREDIT: Alex Edelman-Pool/Getty Images)
Stivers is far from the first Republican to hint at cutting crucial programs to help drive down the national debt, but he is the first to specifically link it to the financial failures of the tax bill.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI)
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) said outright last year that Medicare and Medicaid were his next targets for 2018, following the passage of the tax bill.
“We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” Ryan said during December appearance on Ross Kaminsky’s talk radio show. “…Frankly, it’s the health care entitlements that are the big drivers of our debt, so we spend more time on the health care entitlements — because that’s really where the problem lies, fiscally speaking.”
Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA)
Immediately following the tax bill’s passage in December last year, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) how he could simultaneously vote for a huge tax cut for the rich while advocating cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
“We’ve got entitlement spending that is not sustainable,” Toomey replied. “These big spending programs that are growing faster than the economy. You can’t tax your way out of that problem. You’ve got to make some curbs.”
Sen. John Thune (R-SD)
Sen. John Thune (R-SD) told the Washington Post early last December that Congress could consider entitlement reforms as means to cut government spending and reduce the deficit stemming from the tax bill.
“If we’re going to do something about spending and debt, we have to get faster growth in the economy — which I hope tax reform will achieve. But we have also got to take on making our entitlement programs more sustainable,” Thune said. “I think there is support, generally, here for entitlement reform.”
Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK)
Cole has admitted in the past he is not a “deep economic thinker,” yet believes Medicare and Social Security, rather than huge handouts for the wealthiest Americans, are what the country should be concerned about.
“If someone wants to get serious about debt, come talk to me about entitlements,” he explained. “Tax cuts produce growth, entitlement spending doesn’t.”
That Republicans have their eye on slashing government programs comes as no surprise, of course. Shortly after Congress passed the tax bill, op-ed columnist Bryce Covert of The New York Times warned of the “Trojan horse” hidden in the legislation that would serve as a setup for steep cuts.
“Republican leaders have wanted to do this for a long time. Mr. Ryan has been salivating over cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security for as long as he’s had a political career. Mr. Trump’s 2018 budget proposal, released well ahead of the tax legislation, named welfare reform’ one of its core pillars,” she wrote. “…Now that they’ve succeeded in passing a tax package that will reduce government revenues so much, the ensuing cost will serve as the excuse to get everything else they want.”
thinkprogress.org/republicans-voted-tax-bill-cut-medicare-social-security-pay-488a9bcbba7d/
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