What an amazing year ! new tax law primes US for growth

https://www.politico.com/magazine/s...-retire-speaker-ready-leave-washington-216103

Which is exactly what Paul Ryan and the Republicans plan to do next year. It is more than a little ballsie to try to gut popular third rail programs in an election year but Ryan says he is not running again in 2018 and is retiring. It is almost like they know 2018 is looking like a year where they will get creamed so why not send as many kickbacks and favors to lobbyists as possible so they can get their K street golden parachut all lined up?

But AT&T is giving money back to its employees! Comcast, too! Proof that tax cuts help everyone and corporations really care about their employees!

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/365989-mcconnell-entitlement-reform-not-on-2018-senate-agenda

This is surprising. Ryan keeps saying full speed ahead for guting "entitlements" but McConnell is backing out.

Wow, you're really dense. That's exactly what we're saying. The tax rate was 90% but no one paid that rate because they had incentives to reinvest profits, donate to charities, and other things to reduce their tax burden which also boosted the economy. This new tax bill removes all those incentives. Just as the Bush era tax cuts removed incentives to reinvest, etc. Tax cuts like these have been overwhelmingly shown to hurt the economy while enriching the already wealthy.

What pisses people off is that a family with two kids making $120,000 a year might get $200 a year out of this while a hedge fund manager making $400 million per year ends up paying a much lower effective tax rate due to the corrupt carried interest loophole.

It is obscene that a guy making $400 million a year pays a lower effective tax rate than a cop in the same city.

The next few months?

It should be noted that the 2010 budget law about deficits specifies that there be automatic cuts to things like entitlements if the deficit gets to large. This tax give away to the biggest donors will trigger that so we will see an automatic $470 billion over 10 years cut to medicare unless someone changes something.

Nothing will change until May and I doubt many people will even notice the $3 per pay chack difference. They likely will notice the big tax increase at the state level though which means they end up owning a much bigger total tax bill.

The thing that pisses many of us off is the big blue states already pay way more to the feds than we get back while the crappy red states usually get way more than they pay. This makes that problem way worse yet Republicans arrogants kept saying "red states shouldn't subsidize blue states"; when it has ALWAYS been the other way around. This bill causes us to pay more while the dead beat Republican states get more.

It's interesting - in order to justify this and maintain that they're still actually deficit hawks, Paul Ryan and his gang have declared that the economic growth spurred by the tax cuts will make these changes revenue neutral. Very obvious bullshit, of course - which just proves that they're not interested in reducing deficits in the first place except as a propaganda justification for their class warfare.

Nobody's sure when it'll kick in, or what kind of paperwork we're going to have to fill out because of it.

Oh, and if I were you, I wouldn't be blowing that money on a new TV or anything. I'd stick it into some kind of nice, safe, investment so that when the economy craters in a few years (or so), you've got an emergency fund.

America would be far better off leaving the tax rates as they are and using the revenue to buy down on infrastructure improvement, which would definitely create jobs AND make investment more likely.

But no, Trump thinks he can do infrastructure by offering yet more tax breaks to companies who bid for the contracts. Except now he can't pay them, because he doesn't have the tax dollars coming in.

Not that failing to pay contractors has stopped him in the past, but I think it may be a TAD more difficult this time.

Oh, we aren't changing our spending habits. My wife likes having money. She hates spending it.

The reality won't hit him until April '19. Then we'll have to listen to him whine.

That's why they made the individual tax cuts temporary.

So did they end up putting that trigger where if the economy tanks, taxes would automatically go back up? Because that sounded like a wonderful idea.

I don't think so. I really think drastic things would have to happen to let any of these people connect to reality. Just having less money in their pay than they did before won't make them doubt that they are receiving more money in their pay than before.

Fuck me sideways...

If I hadn't just gone through going back to a W2 job, it'd be time to become an S-corp, I guess.

"Did you hear the rumor, Smith? Choco ration's going up!"

Yep. That one's going to screw over a lot of people. Not to mention stopping others who are thinking of trying something entrepreneurial from taking the chance.

Hey, maybe we can all get unpaid jobs in Donnie Smallhands' casinos.

I thought it was because of the Senate rules.

If we got more efficient in our spending we could be far more effective with the money we do spend. If we paid market rate instead of list price for drugs we'd save billions, if we didn't require provailing wage on transportation projects we could do 50% more projects a year, if we didn't have all these corrupt no bid contracts that are cost plus we would save billions. Hell, if we fixed defense contracts so they weren't bloated cost plus we'd save billions.

Meanwhile, because politicians corruptly do what ever the big pharma lobbyists want we have a massive pain killer problem which is actually causing average life expectancy in the US to keep falling.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/21/health/us-life-expectancy-study/index.html

If we can't solve the big money corruption problem then our country is going to continue to go down the shitter.

Gunmakers and liquor manufacturer/distributors disagree !

We are at a point in time when corporate profits and corporate cash hoarding have never been greater. The idea that corporations will suddenly plow the tax savings into new investments is laughable. They could buy back their stock, but the stock market has been on a tear since the beginning of the Obama administration. While the stock price would go up in the short term it wouldn't be the best investment. Better to wait for the next recession and buy your stock back at a much lower price. They could pay out dividends, and let the benefits accrue to the investor class. This will further widen the gulf between rich and poor in the US. Or they could look to the M&A front and reduce competition. Notice none of these options involve paying more in wages to their own employees.

What's sad is we have so many more important issues in this country (health care, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, Social Security, veterans, etc) and instead of focusing on those issues the Republicans decided to make a massive tax cut for the wealthy their number one priority.

As Mitch McConnell said on the floor of the Senate to other Republicans, we have to deliver tax cuts for the donors or else they will stop giving us donations. They are nothing but corrupt whores who literally will do anything for bribe money.

Looks like that BOOM was nothing more than a fart in the wind:

http://fox4kc.com/2017/12/20/hundreds-of-metro-att-employees-laid-off-just-before-christmas

It looks like a P.R. stunt for a increase in their minimum wage they had long promised and planned for anyway. I truly think the tax bill had nothing to do with anything.

Credi McConnell, mot Trump. Garland's seat was not the only one McConnell unethically stole from President obama. He allowed the court backlog to explode while he held open 102 seats for the next president to fill.

all Trump has to do is rubber stamp whoever the Federalist Society points out to him.

among the which are men who've never taken a deposition, never tried a case, and gained their reputation via hateful blog posts. Oh, and at least a third of them are Christian Nationalists who fully intend to impose their doctrine from the bench including one asshole now withdrawn who called trans kids "part of satan's plan"
You can hardly assume men who've never actually been in a courtroom other than traffic court are great constitutional scholars.

Because who the fuck wants clean air and water anyway, amirite? They had a photo-op the other day (almost certainly bullshit but going with it) showing a stack of papers representing mid-60's regulations and current...of course good luck finding 10% of the people (other than fuckers who's business model only works if they are fucking someone over) who want to go back to the things we lived with in terms of health and safty in the 60's.
But hey, without regulations Trump University would still be scamming trusting gullible souls and lining Trump's pockets with ill gotten gain so I can see why he'd oppose them.

The kool-aid must be spiked with some seriously nice PGA. The problem for clear-headed observers to note here is that they said the same shit about previous supply-side tax cutting and the promises never really came true. It'll be fun to read this thread and ask for receipts after the next huge recession (who am I kidding though, Tuttle will sooner blame the interference of the Leprechaun Cabal as admit his kool-aid was really poison0

Hey, if the Republicans have passed a bill that traveled backwards and time and provoked two quarters of growth which occurred before it was even written, that would be a hell of an accomplishment. But sadly most of us don't believe in magic.

If Obama had wiped out cancer Trump would be giving away free unfiletered Camels and you'd be volunteering your weekends to drive the truck.

On the other hand, more than likely you're just trolling because you never came across as so remarkably stupid until it became clear Trump would win the GOP nomination.

So, using Republicans' own claims here, let's walk through this:
U.S. Corporations are sitting on a combined $3.1 TRILLION in profit held offshore (Trump claims it's $4 trillion, or 5, maybe 6, but everyone else knows that like all his claims that is bullshit)

They HAVE this money IN HAND and they keep it there because they wish to EVADE TAXES on it while you pay yours.

So the Republican solution to this problem is to lower or eliminate taxes on it so that they get to keep it, basically penalty free, in a different bank.

And this is supposed to help us all?

Link

Where's @K. I wonder eh @Paladin ?