$1.5 Trillion GOP Tax Cut Thread

[pbrower2a]

I suppose you don't want to talk about how the economy was doing when the Bush tax cuts fully took effect circa 2008-2010.

This is at least the second time in the last couple weeks you have tried to connect the Bush tax cuts to the Financial Crisis. You clearly have no idea what you are talking about because those are totally unrelated to each other. Stop.

The Bush Tax cuts were sold as an economic stimulus, which was obviously an epic fail.

It was sold as an economic stimulus to the early 2000s recession , which indeed it was . The 2008 crash still would have happened without the tax cuts , so no the tax cuts and the crash are not related.

Big infusions of capital into the hands of economic elites tend to go into destructive bubbles. Yes, it is the bubble that does the harm, first by drawing assets away from other activities and committing the political order to servicing that bubble; the inevitable panic comes when people come to realize that the assets in which they invested are worthless.    

The Trump tax cuts may be shaped not so much as stimulus as they are giving economic elites rewards for being rich and powerful.

Count on another 2008-style crash leading to a 1929-style crash.

[pbrower2a]

It gives me every incentive to be reborn as a Rothschild or a Rockefeller. But what can you expect from a President who fits a Marxist stereotype of a capitalist pig?

[pbrower2a]

We are screwed.

Our government is bought.

To the Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah:

Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah
Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah

For Mammon, God omnipotent reigneth
Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah
For Mammon, God omnipotent reigneth
Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah
King of kings and Lord of lords
King of kings and Lord of lords
And GREED shall reign forever and ever
Forever and ever
Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah
Hallelujah

...Mammon is Lord, and Ayn Rand is its Messiah, at least in America!

[pbrower2a]

Not just Climate change, in every question, College educated Republicans are giving crazy answers. Totally weird, maybe all these crazy conservative organizations in colleges & Infowars is having some effect.

To get a gist of the supposedly educated college Republican, read this from the GMU College Reps http://gmufourthestate.com/2017/10/02/patriot-politics-trump-tweets-by-gmcr/

Excerpt:

"While President Trump’s Twitter habit may concern some people, the concerning aspect of his tweeting is the media’s obsession with it. While the media is obsessing with his tweets, President Trump is accomplishing his agenda. Overreaching EPA regulations are being repealed, prototypes of the wall are being built, the U.S. has left the Paris Climate Agreement, Neil Gorsuch filled the seat vacated by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the Keystone XL pipeline has been approved. While the media is worrying about his next tweet, President Trump is Making America Great Again."

Borderline cultish.

Praise for dubious achievements.

That's how cults and totalitarian movements operate.

[pbrower2a]

This tax cut has one purpose: to further concentrate wealth and power in a tiny segment of the populace, to wit a class that will operate as the land-holding, share-holding, and administrative aristocracies. It punishes any effort of the common man to get ahead by going to college.

It may not be fair, but I see this tax policy as an effort to punish people who failed to recognize the greatness of Donald Trump and the idea that no human suffering is in excess so long as it turns, indulges, or enforces a profit.

We have no shortage of capital. All that I can see is that capital will be cast into efforts to further monopolize the American economy, privatize the public sector (if it can turn a profit), and reward people exclusively for being born into the Right Family.

This is the intended America, the one that I see as the expression of Make America Great Again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda#/media/File:Anti-capitalism_color.gif

Sure, that poster dates from 1911, and the technology and style will be very different. Life will of course be great for anyone who isn't a prole. But proles will be the vast majority of the people.   They will suffer whether they are the factory or farm laborers, the domestic servants. the vast majority of people in food service and retail -- and they will be condemned to their lot as serfs in all but name.

Expecting noble behavior from a nobility or quasi-nobility is sheer folly. I recall seeing a story from American Heritage Magazine on how masters saw thee relationship between themselves and their slaves: the masters saw themselves as benefactors to the slaves that they so crassly exploited and degraded.

America will become much like the sorts of places that many of our ancestors left due to the hopelessness of improving life, if not outright danger of persecution, starvation, or massacres.    

[pbrower2a]

The thing that shocks me is certain people here say how suburanties were a deadend for dems because once Trump is gone and the culture warrior stuff dies down they'll go back to the GOP but this almost guarantee the suburbs going dem as now they are going to get hit in the pocketbook by Trump/GOP as well

From the 1950s to about the 1990s the suburbs were the core area of support for Republicans. I remember when suburban counties like Orange County in California were the most right-wing areas in America. That's when Suburbia still had a rural feel -- when the suburbs were new, when their infrastructure was cheap to maintain, and before apartment complexes supplanted the bungalows of the immediate post-WWII  era. Today many of those suburbs are legitimately urban. Infrastructure from the late 1940s and 1950s is wearing out, and it requires expensive replacement. Apartment complexes put more vehicles on streets inadequate for the greater traffic, requiring expensive highway projects. What used to be a cheap place to live except for initial costs of housing has become places with high taxes. Such is so whether the urban center nearby is in decline (like Cleveland) or still prosperous (San Francisco).

[pbrower2a]

We have practically a 51-49 split in representation, and the 51 gets 100% of the power.

[pbrower2a]

If I understood correctly, the House bill could really raise taxes on people like me on graduation tuition waivers at private universities by taxing the waiver as income.  Many of us have very little money and loads of debt, and they want to act like we are high rollers. I should be out by the time this would go into effect, and take limited courses at the moment, but man...

I don't know the details, so I would love if someone could explain this isn't as bad as it sounds.

But think of the alternatives to grad school. You could be a domestic servant who gets to live in the radiant glow of people so wealthy that their very presence will almost blind you! You could be a farm laborer! You might shine shoes!

Face it -- Do0nald Trump and the GOP hate smart, educated people because they can see through the propaganda and the fraudulence of the order.

I see no silver lining. This will probably stick until America undergoes a revolution or is defeated in a catastrophic war.

[pbrower2a]

Good reason exists for pushing it today. Tomorrow is Saturday, and there could be mass rallies and protests if the bill is up for a vote. It is difficult to vote in the presence of large protests and demonstrations. Republicans want a done deal that will Make America Great Again -- for someone like a plutocrat of the 1920s. 

Tomorrow is supposed to have unusually good weather for early December.

[pbrower2a]

Biggest. Heist. Ever.

[pbrower2a]

The Democratic Party needs to declare war against the Republicans. Absolutely no more meetings, phone calls, or working together of any kind. The GOP does not act in good faith

This but instead of Republicans, just the rich in general.

All elected republicans are irredeemable trash

Uneccesary qualifier.

Oh so the EVIL Koch brothers who employ 100,000 Americans and have given 70 million dollars to the smithsonian.

Hammas and Hezbollah also do charitable work and employ people ya dunce

No they don’t.
Name to me a single person the Koch brothers have killed.
Also the Koch brothers are anti war.

The Koch suckers are going to kill the entire human race due to the damage they've done in discrediting climate change. No single organization on Earth is more committed to multiplying human suffering than the Republican Party. A conglomerate of corporate useful idiots who are proud of their ignorance.

Inundation of the lowlands of much of the world implies the inundation of a great share of the world's richest farmland even if the farmers are not rich. Maybe the plots of land are too small.  But this said, a peasant farmer in Bangladesh has as much right to life as an American billionaire.

Inundation of lands in which hundreds of millions of peasant farmers live holds the potential for mass death on a scale that would trivialize such genocide as the Atlantic Slave Trade, the massacres of First Peoples of the Americas, the Holocaust, and the mass deaths from collectivization of Soviet and Chinese agriculture. Just to prevent the mass death, we would need a huge transplantation of peoples.

Although tropical uplands may be more fertile than tropical lowlands, non-tropical uplands are not more productive. The thin, nutrient-poor, rocky soils of subarctic regions cannot quickly become excellent farmland. The only possible expansion in the food supply would be fishing -- except that the biggest catches of fish are in cold waters, typically in subpolar areas (the Grand Banks or the Bering Sea) or in zones of upwelling waters usually to the west of desert or semidesert areas.

So in a fairly prosperous area  that now has an excellent farm productivity (like the Netherlands or southeastern Pennsylvania) fishing could not offset the loss of farming.

The Trump commitment to the burning of fossil fuels for energy  has consequences in disruption of the world's climatic patterns, melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and inundation of farmland.

Whatever your ideology you need get this straight; food production is the cornerstone of any economy except in some desert countries that have small populations and large oil reserves. Should the crops fail, then all else becomes void. It is easy to take a food supply for granted, especially if you see food only in the grocery store, in the kitchen, or on a dinner plate. Yes, the investment bankers of New York City and the computing geniuses of Silicon Valley are exceedingly clever, but no financial instrument and no electronic gadget can ever substitute for food. There is no financial wizardry or technological fix for starvation.

Sure, the Koch brothers are anti-war. They know what can happen to economic elites that support wars for profit that their countries lose. Even if the victors are firmly capitalist, the capitalists of the losing side may find themselves dispossessed as war criminals with the capitalists of the winning side taking over the assets of the losers as reparations.  Such alternative history SF as The Man in the High Castle practically takes that for granted.

  

[pbrower2a]

It’s great salt I should repealed now the voters are forced to elect republicans in blue states.

Can you say that again in English?

Sorry

It’s great that salt is repealed now maybe blue states will become republican.

An observation: over time, most political figures fit the political culture of the community in which they live. As a state legislature, a city council member, a DA, a mayor, or a member of Congress, one does so if one wants to get ahead in electoral politics. Contrarians rarely go far in politics. What fits the Texas Panhandle does not fit New York City -- or even a 'blue' (atlas red) city in a Red (atlas blue) state, like... Houston.

One thing that I have noticed about Donald Trump: this man is completely out of touch with New York City values. He is also far out of touch with Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Denver, Miami, Minneapolis, Seattle, or Los Angeles values. To the extent that a community in any way resembles New York City in cost of living or population density, voters reject Donald Trump. He reminds people of the capitalist that they least admire: the landlord who raises the rent at the first convenience.

It may be an oversimplification to say that landlords like Donald Trump explain why the cost of living is so high in the Bay Area or Long Island.  Maybe landlords get a bad rap for having what looks like a cash cow that requires no innovation and seems to create few jobs.  But we all know that even if one is somewhat sympathetic to capitalism one's capitalist heroes are more likely to be innovators -- whether John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, or Sam Walton. Definitely not some real-estate tycoon who grabs every bit of your take-home pay as is possible.

But in relatively-cheap places to live, landlords like Donald Trump are not the problem. The problem is perhaps a dying local economy as in Detroit, Cleveland, or St. Louis. Trump made promises to skin the middle class and deliver jobs. All I see him doing is transferring wealth of the middle class to a Master Class, irresponsible people to whom we will all have great responsibilities and from whom we can expect nothing in return.

I would now vote Communist before I would vote for the GOP.



 

[pbrower2a]

But the benefits all go to the Master Class this time.

If I were 30 years younger and had the chance and means with which to emigrate, I would, especially if I had children. A political system that puts the enrichment of elites above all else and treats formal education as seditious is a place for only the super-rich and those willing to be consigned to losing.

It would be far easier to learn a Slavic language than to do well in the aristocratic America now forming.

[pbrower2a]

But the benefits all go to the Master Class this time.

If I were 30 years younger and had the chance and means with which to emigrate, I would, especially if I had children. A political system that puts the enrichment of elites above all else and treats formal education as seditious is a place for only the super-rich and those willing to be consigned to losing.

It would be far easier to learn a Slavic language than to do well in the aristocratic America now forming.

Don't give up on the US! In many ways a fantastic country, that is just currently on a wrong path. I live in a great country, but I have to say that I also loved the one year I lived in the US more than 20 years. That's why I still love the country and still follow US politics after all this time. If the democrats can find a way to get people to freakin' vote, then everything is there for the taking to make the US as great as it could be!

OK, the Soviet Union had a rich cultural heritage, a fine scientific community, and a commitment to rapid economic growth, too. Lots of people thought Nazi Germany awesome too with its colorful, focused pageantry, its full employment (any country can get full employment if it pays starvation wages), and its dazzling new superhighways, which was easy enough -- as long as one didn't pay attention to those sorrowful people with yellow Stars of David.

The only good thing that I can see is that the Reactionaries aren't tampering with the electoral process. But this said, Master Classes elsewhere have taken power quickly and completely and have not yielded power that they do not want to lose, especially when such compromises their class privilege.

We now live in the Jim Crow South without the overt racism, which is awful. That's better than a world of concentration camps and torture chambers, or for that matter, the Jim Crow South with the overt racism....

I am not convinced about any goodness of the American people which would manifest itself in electoral results. The President acts like a despot, and his agenda serves people who want everything and are ready to take it. I have seen many cases in history in which the Master Class, seeing its class privilege under threat, turns to tyranny and mass murder to enforce its will.

I hate Donald Trump, and I hate the Republican Party. I see the degradation of political discourse as official truth, even on scientific matters of which the President is grossly ignorant, is identical with the blathering of a dictatorial leader. I see one Party having completed the transition to a cadre party characteristic of fascism, Communism, or Ba'athism. I see politics in part as a desire to take revenge upon people who voted 'wrong' in the last election and are unlikely to vote 'right' the next time. This is the ugliest time in American history (ruling out racism that America took decades to even alleviate) since the Civil War. At the least America came out of the Great Depression as a better country than it went in.

Maybe that is what it will take.

 

We have been on a binge of economic elitism for nearly forty years, with a few little corrections for a couple of years with the Clinton and Obama Presidencies. Nothing has reduced the arrogance and economic sadism of our economic elites. They let Obama protect their assets from enduring the sort of economic meltdown that lasted for three harsh years by arresting it after a year and a half. Then those elites bought the government in stages until those elites have control of everything.

Bleak as the gray line suggests things could get, the Great Depression had one salubrious effect: America came out of it better than it went in. The economic elites were disabused of any sense of superiority of the masses. America began to have faith in government and small business (the 1930s were a good time for starting a small business due to cheap labor, cheap rents, cheap inventories, and customer loyalty... if you owned a grocery store and hired a kid from a large family, then you might get that family's grocery budget... by the end of the 1930s few people had nostalgia for anything about the 1920s except perhaps to get some youth back.

Nothing smashes elite arrogance as effectively as does an economic downturn that those elites cannot escape. The economic elites are going to rule America as long as they can get away with it, and if they must murder democracy to keep their class privilege they will. After all, political prisoners are easy to exploit and completely expendable. 

I'm not too scared. I have a hibachi. In a time like this, I realize that there are worse dance partners than the Grim Reaper. 

[pbrower2a]

A bill with F_CKING illegible hand written edits in the margins was passed! F_CK REPUBLICANS AND THEIR VOTERS.

This is all highly irregular. Rushed legislation with no effort to win over the other side?

This is what goes on under dictatorships.

[pbrower2a]

A bill with F_CKING illegible hand written edits in the margins was passed! F_CK REPUBLICANS AND THEIR VOTERS.

You can just tell it was a Republican too: bad handwriting and tons of basic spelling mistakes

Which themselves will bring up Constitutional questions.

[pbrower2a]

A bill with F_CKING illegible hand written edits in the margins was passed! F_CK REPUBLICANS AND THEIR VOTERS.

You can just tell it was a Republican too: bad handwriting and tons of basic spelling mistakes

Which themselves will bring up Constitutional questions.

I'm waiting for someone to discover a typo that changes intent, something like a reduction in taxes on boats being written as "boots".

In one state some drug offenders had to be released because the statute prohibited "ethamphetamine" instead of "methamphetamine". 

[pbrower2a]

A bill with F_CKING illegible hand written edits in the margins was passed! F_CK REPUBLICANS AND THEIR VOTERS.

You can just tell it was a Republican too: bad handwriting and tons of basic spelling mistakes

Which themselves will bring up Constitutional questions.

I'm waiting for someone to discover a typo that changes intent, something like a reduction in taxes on boats being written as "boots".

In one state some drug offenders had to be released because the statute prohibited "ethamphetamine" instead of "methamphetamine". 

How did this post become the #1 search result of "ethamphetamine typo in law" in google.  I think you made this up now.

It was in an issue of Playboy Magazine about 35 years ago.

The typo has been corrected.

[pbrower2a]

A number of my left-wing friends have said, "as much as it sucks that it's a corporate give away, I desperately need to keep some more money." Most of my friends makes between $35k and $55k (myself included). What's the best argument to use to encourage my friends not to support this tax plan?

Suggest ways of saving money -- like doing some shopping at Goodwill, Salvation Army, or St. Vincent DePaul.  Brown-bag a lunch on occasion. See whether you can cut back on cable TVF service by giving up channels that you rarely watch. Buy generic foods at the grocery store if they are adequate. Have a yard sale. Sell off some collectibles that no longer thrill you.

Take vacations closer to home.  Make fewer trips to the shopping mall or the box store. Arrange for automatic deductions for savings.

These are tough times unless one is part of the economic elite. There is no escape from that reality. If this tax cut, really a heist by a few people intent on transforming America into a pure plutocracy, things stand to get really bad as the elites find ways to cut wages and compel people to work unpaid overtime.

Of course this heist will succeed because evil people dominate the American political system.

[pbrower2a]

This tax policy is intended to punish people who did not support Donald Trump and the Reactionary Party. It is worse than bad public policy; it is a crime against all that is decent in the American political heritage. All that surprises me was that certain ethnic groups are not subjected to discriminatory taxes.

A government that can make its opponents suffer and then chooses to impose such suffering  is on the fast track to tyranny.

The solution to 2017  is

1776

[pbrower2a]

It's hard to talk about whether this bill could spur growth when currently we have close to full employment in the economy and our government is driving out undocumented immigrants and aiming to lower legal immigration, and where the cost of borrowing capital is close to zero. Our economy doesn't need growth to be spurred, and certainly not by favoring capital further.

It is about transferring any future growth, much income that people not already rich get, and wealth not already in the hands of the Master Class to the Master Class.   To be sure, that has largely happened; enhanced productivity has not trickled down to the working people.

Even worse: it uses tax policies to punish people whose demographics indicate tha t they would never vote for Donald Trump or the GOP in a free election. This is political economics at its worst: patronage  of supporters and punishment of opponents.  

I see the tax cuts going largely to speculative activities, further concentration of the economy, privatization of the public sector (highways are a natural monopoly), and buying further GOP control of the political process.

This fits a Marxist stereotype of capitalism. There will be more, including efforts to eviscerate labor unions so that Big Business is 'free' to drive pay to Third World levels.