I don't know who they are talking to but I'm working class and at the very least they should cut taxes immediately. As I single white male I owe every year one top of what they and pay more. While everyone is getting 12-15000 thousand dollar returns under the earned income credit I am pay a couple thousand on top for services I've never and will never get to use. At least cut it but abolish it completely would be the best solution.
Your comment reminded me of something I am pretty sure it was Ann said. She compared 2nd Amendment supporters of the Right to anti abortion supporters of the Left. I think her point was that both sides have blind sides and get caught up in their own tunnel vision.
Except for the difference that the Second Amendment is an enumerated Constitutional amendment, and both the word and concept of abortion is nowhere found in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. The “right” to abortion is on the same level as the “right” to healthcare.
Not to mention that all of our rights, even Constitutional, are, in the end, what 9 jurists in black robes decide what they are at any given moment in time.
Trump is on right path with the tariff taxes. If you don't want to pay them then don't buy the goods. Same with sales taxes. The rest of the revenue should come from a one rate low income tax that everyone pays. Get rid of most of the deductions.
All that progress reducing the deficits that Trump made in his first term proves your point. Oh wait, even with the unemployment rate hitting an incredibly low 3.5% pre-pandemic, Trump made zero progress reducing the deficits. Worse yet, he is in complete denial when it comes to the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare.
As for "then don't buy the goods," you left out "and make yourself poorer by buying the higher-priced domestic goods of companies protected from competition." Try reading some Adam Smith, who debunked the notion of the trade deficit back in 1776.
I would suggest that if we do not find a way to grow all the rest wont matter it will all collapse on itself.Naturally people who pay taxes dont care about tax cuts but again lower taxes produce growth which allows for all the things cass suggests he wants. Trump is right to want to cut taxes and to reduce regulations...Cass and his acolytes are basically dick gephardt dems
George H.W. Bush had a 90% approval after Desert Storm. A mild recession beat him. Bill Clinton was reviled, but the economy saved him. 5% growth would have made Kamala Harris the president.
Inflation and job security are more important to voters than immigration, crime, Ukraine, Israel, and every tranny in Massachusetts put together.
Taxes should be an even-handed way of raising money for the operation of the government. Taxes should not be used as punishment nor as a reward (i.e. mortgage interest deduction if you buy a house or charitable deductions for those who contribute). Give everyone the first $50K of income "free" (so this avoid punishing the poor) and tax everyone else at the same rate (21% or whatever). Lower rates for dividends and capital gains make no sense. Why should hard working people pay a higher percentage than those who have their money doing the "working"? Warren Buffett bitches about this all the time but still enjoys his 15 % rate. The same rate for everyone is what their "fair share" is. Eliminate deductions and other accounting tricks. The integrity and morality of a government can be no greater than the method by which it raises money for its operations.
Crazy notions about the utilitarian value of an extra dollar of income are just disingenuous justifications for progressive rates and progressive theft.
Trump is again talking about removing the "carried interest loophole" received by private equity and hedge fund managers. Steve Bannon has been pushing for this also. Mitt Romney made a killing on this deduction, paying little tax on millions in income. When he ran for president, if I recall correctly, he decided to pay more than he legally owed because the optics looked so bad on his tax return.
However, if you make the first 50K tax free for everyone, even more people won't have to pay any federal income taxes. That's going in the wrong direction. More people should have some skin in the game, even if they don't have to pay much.
I don’t have the actual statistics but I recall that half the population already pays nothing in taxes, thanks to the standard deduction and various credits. Trying to get them to get skin in the game is a lost cause. But getting multi-millionaires or billionaires to pay 21% on their dividend income instead 15% would produce real dollars. More to the point, a single rate for all would be fair, not one rate for me and another for thee.
Ronald Reagan had the same problem and his OMB director David Stockman resigned in frustration because he couldn't balance the budget and cut taxes at the same time.
Your mention of Stockman caused me to re read the passages concerning him in WSJ editorial page editor Robert Bartley's book, "The Seven Fat Years."
Stockman's preoccupation was cutting SPENDING in order to reduce the deficit and to rein in the welfare state. His efforts were of course thwarted by pols who would never agree to spending cuts (spending in their view having nothing to do with deficits) and whose opposition to spending cuts was only exceeded by their opposition to tax cuts, not because marginal tax rate reductions would decrease revenue (the Steiger Amendment had already demonstrated the opposite during Carter's term) but because tax cuts reduce pols' ability to drill holes for favored interests into the tax code. Indeed, Obama admitted as much on the topic of capital gains tax rates, saying they were more about fairness than economics.
"Stockman's odyssey, though, contributed mightily to the legacy of misunderstanding. From it the nation learned that the deficit caused the recession of 1982 and would abort any recovery in 1983. And would collapse the expansion, as the conventional wisdom held, in 1984, 85, 96, 87, 88 and 1989. From David Stockman and the events around him, we learned that The Seven Fat Years could never happen."
David Stockman also did a highly controversial interview in 1981 in The Atlantic in which he threw in the towel on Reagan’s much vaunted supply-side economics.
because of his frustration at not getting deeper spending cuts. I didn't want to write everything Bartley wrote on the topic. So I'll add just a bit.
"The [Atlantic] article was quickly read into the Congressional Record by gleeful Democrats. Laced with convenient tag lines like 'trickle down' and 'trojan horse,' it provided as proof that the Reagan policies were an intellectual fraud, and that the tax cuts had caused the recession even before they became effective.
"The Greider article was published at precisely the opportune moment, just as tight money and the delay of an effective tax cut was putting recession into place. Stockman's background as a supply sider made him an effective spokesman for the opposite point of view."
As I wrote in a previous thread, A bad year for the WSJ, citing Bartley, the recession of 1982 need not have happened. The Michael 1 policy mix of tight money and loose fiscal policy had worked its way into the public discourse on the editorial pages of the WSJ -- the lay press, as Bartley called it. It was in the Reagan campaign via Kemp Roth, so presumably the public knew what they were voting for.
[as an aside, Bartley said that his proudest achievement as editorial page editor was to get onto an airplane and see all the businessmen open their WSJ straight to the op ed pages. :-) ]
Problems arose when the Dems hair caught fire, suddenly worrying themselves with deficits and "$200 billion in hot checks."
The Volcker tightening was part of the package, but the tax cuts got delayed thanks to worries -- and I use that term loosely -- about deficits. The market took off when the tax cuts arrived.
It is open to debate whether Stockman could have had more impact with his calls for spending cuts. The fact that he just up and bailed indicates he certainly thought he was flogging a dead horse.
Perhaps DOGE has put into the lay press the idea of spending cuts.......
Agree to an extent. We need to make the tax code more efficient and to incentivize business to employ people in the US. But I would be fine if the personal income tax rates went back to the Clinton level. I would also like to see everyone on the tax rolls. The GOP traded tax cuts for the top with eliminating taxes on the bottom so that 47% pay no income tax.
What I would really like to see is the elimination of the BS tax shelters and trusts.
All the high income tax cuts from Trump's first term should expire (I'm a retired CPA and this impacts me). Income tax rates for individuals with AGI <100K and couples <150K should be slashed with three brackets. Eliminating income tax on social security should only apply to those that need it to make ends meet. Most boomers like myself have already collected way more than we paid in once we are in our 70s. Eliminating the tax on tips isn't a bad idea. It helps the working class, and since so many tips are in cash, it eliminates an enforcement problem. There's your tax bill.
Trump's worst three ideas for lowering taxes are removing taxes on tips, all social security regardless of income, and esp, taxes on overtime. They all increase unfairness in the tax code. But most people can't get past Trump's sloganeering when on the campaign trail. I hope that Congress still has enough sense to shoot them down. I doubt if Trump will actually pursue them now that he's had access to the latest numbers. If you're in a deep hole the first thing to do is to stop digging.
Ann makes a good point on this and I largely agree even though I am getting screwed on taxes personally. The problem is that too few actually pay anyway. They might care if they paid but Trump had to jump through crazy hoops to give them a tax cut last time. The EIC has become crazy as well as other deductions. I know people who pay nothing and get like $8,000 from the government. Having said that, I do not think people want their taxes raised which is what will happen if the Rs do nothing and let the Trump cuts expire. So I expect a sort or bait and switch tax relief that doesn't do much (now on the corporate side they may go nuts, you know to make us "more competitive"). Maybe they increase the SALT cap and index it for inflation.
They will need to be careful because the promise on tip tax was a big deal to some. They can't get rid of it because then we will all ask to be paid in tips. So, they could offer an exclusion of some hard amount, say $1000 or $2000. I guess that would be easiest. I suggested elsewhere a percentage exclusion tied to gross income. So maybe one could deduct 5% of gross income in tips up to $50,000 in gross income. That would encourage people to be paid regularly as well as in tips. So if someone made 50k in regular gross income, they could deduct $2500 in tip income. That would be the maximum deduction. This is the one thing I think they need to do in order to keep promises.
I won't bother to get into "pay fors" and all that jazz. They'll connive to make it work like a huge tax increase in year 10 that will never happen. But who knows? Maybe we will get something wild like 15-15-15 (RIP Herman Cain!) or some kind of consumption tax. The bottom line is they need to get the fiscal house in order. It is not January 2001 with a budget surplus and Social Security and Medicare bankruptcy 35 years away (and a 3 trillion debt). Nope, we have $35 trillion in debt and SS and Medicare Bankruptcy around the corner. The hour is late and one can't grow their way out of this while still spending like drunken Massachusetts Senators and cutting taxes.
The working class may not be big on tax cuts, but they should be. Everybody thinks tax cuts are boring, not sexy, but BY GOD! TAX CUTS DELIVER! Also what happens when a republican is running for president 4 years from now and GDP growth is NOT greater than 10000 percent daily? The dems and press will shriek about, repeat after me now, “the worst economy since the Great Depression” and the retard working class will give us another Muslim from Kenya so that they can reelect HIM after four years of a truly horrible nightmarish economy. I think that happened once.
It’s easy to get people to support someone else (corporations, “the rich”) to pay for stuff they want. All that spending comes out of your pocket either as inflation, higher interest rates or taxes. Cut spending, especially “poverty relief” hands out first!
I don't know who they are talking to but I'm working class and at the very least they should cut taxes immediately. As I single white male I owe every year one top of what they and pay more. While everyone is getting 12-15000 thousand dollar returns under the earned income credit I am pay a couple thousand on top for services I've never and will never get to use. At least cut it but abolish it completely would be the best solution.
you are correct, see my tax plan above.
The progressive tax code is morally repugnant and the politics of envy.
Most people would not complain about taxes if they did not feel they were getting the shaft.
Comparing the anti-tax zealots in the GOP to the pro-trans, pro-DEI, pro-criminal progressive base of the Democratic Party
now THIS is insane
Your comment reminded me of something I am pretty sure it was Ann said. She compared 2nd Amendment supporters of the Right to anti abortion supporters of the Left. I think her point was that both sides have blind sides and get caught up in their own tunnel vision.
Except for the difference that the Second Amendment is an enumerated Constitutional amendment, and both the word and concept of abortion is nowhere found in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. The “right” to abortion is on the same level as the “right” to healthcare.
Not to mention that all of our rights, even Constitutional, are, in the end, what 9 jurists in black robes decide what they are at any given moment in time.
I have no argument with your points. :-)
not well thought out or not well expressed is not equal to insane.
Deporting 10 to 20 million of illegal aliens would de facto result in one of the biggest spending, inflation and tax cuts in US history.
It is that simple.
imagine the impact if all 70 million were deported.....
Trump is on right path with the tariff taxes. If you don't want to pay them then don't buy the goods. Same with sales taxes. The rest of the revenue should come from a one rate low income tax that everyone pays. Get rid of most of the deductions.
All that progress reducing the deficits that Trump made in his first term proves your point. Oh wait, even with the unemployment rate hitting an incredibly low 3.5% pre-pandemic, Trump made zero progress reducing the deficits. Worse yet, he is in complete denial when it comes to the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare.
As for "then don't buy the goods," you left out "and make yourself poorer by buying the higher-priced domestic goods of companies protected from competition." Try reading some Adam Smith, who debunked the notion of the trade deficit back in 1776.
I would suggest that if we do not find a way to grow all the rest wont matter it will all collapse on itself.Naturally people who pay taxes dont care about tax cuts but again lower taxes produce growth which allows for all the things cass suggests he wants. Trump is right to want to cut taxes and to reduce regulations...Cass and his acolytes are basically dick gephardt dems
Nothing else matters if we don't deport 20 million illegals.....otherwise, in 5 years, we won't be worrying about tax cuts......
Agree, sort of. But there are 600 people in Congress. Can't they cut taxes and deport?
OMG, do you hear yourself? Clearly you are being sarcastic! Good one, haha. They can't chew gum and walk at the same time!
Nothing is more important than the economy.
George H.W. Bush had a 90% approval after Desert Storm. A mild recession beat him. Bill Clinton was reviled, but the economy saved him. 5% growth would have made Kamala Harris the president.
Inflation and job security are more important to voters than immigration, crime, Ukraine, Israel, and every tranny in Massachusetts put together.
Read my lips, no new taxes. That beat him.
Exactly! See my comment.
Taxes should be an even-handed way of raising money for the operation of the government. Taxes should not be used as punishment nor as a reward (i.e. mortgage interest deduction if you buy a house or charitable deductions for those who contribute). Give everyone the first $50K of income "free" (so this avoid punishing the poor) and tax everyone else at the same rate (21% or whatever). Lower rates for dividends and capital gains make no sense. Why should hard working people pay a higher percentage than those who have their money doing the "working"? Warren Buffett bitches about this all the time but still enjoys his 15 % rate. The same rate for everyone is what their "fair share" is. Eliminate deductions and other accounting tricks. The integrity and morality of a government can be no greater than the method by which it raises money for its operations.
Crazy notions about the utilitarian value of an extra dollar of income are just disingenuous justifications for progressive rates and progressive theft.
Trump is again talking about removing the "carried interest loophole" received by private equity and hedge fund managers. Steve Bannon has been pushing for this also. Mitt Romney made a killing on this deduction, paying little tax on millions in income. When he ran for president, if I recall correctly, he decided to pay more than he legally owed because the optics looked so bad on his tax return.
However, if you make the first 50K tax free for everyone, even more people won't have to pay any federal income taxes. That's going in the wrong direction. More people should have some skin in the game, even if they don't have to pay much.
I don’t have the actual statistics but I recall that half the population already pays nothing in taxes, thanks to the standard deduction and various credits. Trying to get them to get skin in the game is a lost cause. But getting multi-millionaires or billionaires to pay 21% on their dividend income instead 15% would produce real dollars. More to the point, a single rate for all would be fair, not one rate for me and another for thee.
Keep quiet if you do not understand why capital gains taxes should be lower
Perhaps you could “explain” it to me. I don’t want to sit quietly in ignorance.😄
Ah, the Dem approach to everything.
that sounds like Dick Armey's tax plan, written in his 1994 WSJ op ed. Along with it was a graphic of his tax form, the size of a postcard.
Ronald Reagan had the same problem and his OMB director David Stockman resigned in frustration because he couldn't balance the budget and cut taxes at the same time.
Easy. Make the 47% of Americans who pay no taxes pay at least pay ten percent. And get rid of EITC.
I know people who get food stamps and take 5 kids to Europe every year on that.
No you don't.
Not on food stamps. On the EITC.
Your mention of Stockman caused me to re read the passages concerning him in WSJ editorial page editor Robert Bartley's book, "The Seven Fat Years."
Stockman's preoccupation was cutting SPENDING in order to reduce the deficit and to rein in the welfare state. His efforts were of course thwarted by pols who would never agree to spending cuts (spending in their view having nothing to do with deficits) and whose opposition to spending cuts was only exceeded by their opposition to tax cuts, not because marginal tax rate reductions would decrease revenue (the Steiger Amendment had already demonstrated the opposite during Carter's term) but because tax cuts reduce pols' ability to drill holes for favored interests into the tax code. Indeed, Obama admitted as much on the topic of capital gains tax rates, saying they were more about fairness than economics.
"Stockman's odyssey, though, contributed mightily to the legacy of misunderstanding. From it the nation learned that the deficit caused the recession of 1982 and would abort any recovery in 1983. And would collapse the expansion, as the conventional wisdom held, in 1984, 85, 96, 87, 88 and 1989. From David Stockman and the events around him, we learned that The Seven Fat Years could never happen."
David Stockman also did a highly controversial interview in 1981 in The Atlantic in which he threw in the towel on Reagan’s much vaunted supply-side economics.
because of his frustration at not getting deeper spending cuts. I didn't want to write everything Bartley wrote on the topic. So I'll add just a bit.
"The [Atlantic] article was quickly read into the Congressional Record by gleeful Democrats. Laced with convenient tag lines like 'trickle down' and 'trojan horse,' it provided as proof that the Reagan policies were an intellectual fraud, and that the tax cuts had caused the recession even before they became effective.
"The Greider article was published at precisely the opportune moment, just as tight money and the delay of an effective tax cut was putting recession into place. Stockman's background as a supply sider made him an effective spokesman for the opposite point of view."
That would be you.
The recession was engineered by Paul Volcker to break the back of inflation which he did after that the markets too off. Stockman resigned too soon.
As I wrote in a previous thread, A bad year for the WSJ, citing Bartley, the recession of 1982 need not have happened. The Michael 1 policy mix of tight money and loose fiscal policy had worked its way into the public discourse on the editorial pages of the WSJ -- the lay press, as Bartley called it. It was in the Reagan campaign via Kemp Roth, so presumably the public knew what they were voting for.
[as an aside, Bartley said that his proudest achievement as editorial page editor was to get onto an airplane and see all the businessmen open their WSJ straight to the op ed pages. :-) ]
Problems arose when the Dems hair caught fire, suddenly worrying themselves with deficits and "$200 billion in hot checks."
The Volcker tightening was part of the package, but the tax cuts got delayed thanks to worries -- and I use that term loosely -- about deficits. The market took off when the tax cuts arrived.
It is open to debate whether Stockman could have had more impact with his calls for spending cuts. The fact that he just up and bailed indicates he certainly thought he was flogging a dead horse.
Perhaps DOGE has put into the lay press the idea of spending cuts.......
Agree to an extent. We need to make the tax code more efficient and to incentivize business to employ people in the US. But I would be fine if the personal income tax rates went back to the Clinton level. I would also like to see everyone on the tax rolls. The GOP traded tax cuts for the top with eliminating taxes on the bottom so that 47% pay no income tax.
What I would really like to see is the elimination of the BS tax shelters and trusts.
All the high income tax cuts from Trump's first term should expire (I'm a retired CPA and this impacts me). Income tax rates for individuals with AGI <100K and couples <150K should be slashed with three brackets. Eliminating income tax on social security should only apply to those that need it to make ends meet. Most boomers like myself have already collected way more than we paid in once we are in our 70s. Eliminating the tax on tips isn't a bad idea. It helps the working class, and since so many tips are in cash, it eliminates an enforcement problem. There's your tax bill.
Oh please could SS be untaxed for ppl like me in the upper middle income? SINGLE IS THE WORST TAX BRACKET.
No it's not. The worst tax bracket is Married Filing Separately.
Trump's worst three ideas for lowering taxes are removing taxes on tips, all social security regardless of income, and esp, taxes on overtime. They all increase unfairness in the tax code. But most people can't get past Trump's sloganeering when on the campaign trail. I hope that Congress still has enough sense to shoot them down. I doubt if Trump will actually pursue them now that he's had access to the latest numbers. If you're in a deep hole the first thing to do is to stop digging.
The unfairness in the tax code is that 47% of people in the USA pay zero taxes.
Ann makes a good point on this and I largely agree even though I am getting screwed on taxes personally. The problem is that too few actually pay anyway. They might care if they paid but Trump had to jump through crazy hoops to give them a tax cut last time. The EIC has become crazy as well as other deductions. I know people who pay nothing and get like $8,000 from the government. Having said that, I do not think people want their taxes raised which is what will happen if the Rs do nothing and let the Trump cuts expire. So I expect a sort or bait and switch tax relief that doesn't do much (now on the corporate side they may go nuts, you know to make us "more competitive"). Maybe they increase the SALT cap and index it for inflation.
They will need to be careful because the promise on tip tax was a big deal to some. They can't get rid of it because then we will all ask to be paid in tips. So, they could offer an exclusion of some hard amount, say $1000 or $2000. I guess that would be easiest. I suggested elsewhere a percentage exclusion tied to gross income. So maybe one could deduct 5% of gross income in tips up to $50,000 in gross income. That would encourage people to be paid regularly as well as in tips. So if someone made 50k in regular gross income, they could deduct $2500 in tip income. That would be the maximum deduction. This is the one thing I think they need to do in order to keep promises.
I won't bother to get into "pay fors" and all that jazz. They'll connive to make it work like a huge tax increase in year 10 that will never happen. But who knows? Maybe we will get something wild like 15-15-15 (RIP Herman Cain!) or some kind of consumption tax. The bottom line is they need to get the fiscal house in order. It is not January 2001 with a budget surplus and Social Security and Medicare bankruptcy 35 years away (and a 3 trillion debt). Nope, we have $35 trillion in debt and SS and Medicare Bankruptcy around the corner. The hour is late and one can't grow their way out of this while still spending like drunken Massachusetts Senators and cutting taxes.
The working class may not be big on tax cuts, but they should be. Everybody thinks tax cuts are boring, not sexy, but BY GOD! TAX CUTS DELIVER! Also what happens when a republican is running for president 4 years from now and GDP growth is NOT greater than 10000 percent daily? The dems and press will shriek about, repeat after me now, “the worst economy since the Great Depression” and the retard working class will give us another Muslim from Kenya so that they can reelect HIM after four years of a truly horrible nightmarish economy. I think that happened once.
It’s easy to get people to support someone else (corporations, “the rich”) to pay for stuff they want. All that spending comes out of your pocket either as inflation, higher interest rates or taxes. Cut spending, especially “poverty relief” hands out first!