The forecast here is for a cold but sunny day. All the better to peer at legislative vaporware.
1. If the spending side needs to be curbed, let the party of tax cuts do the curbing at the time they cut the damn tax, not kick it down road ten years and try to float it on "trickle down" benefits. Take responsibility for the disinvestment in government agency that will inevitably result from the cut.
2. There will be no infrastructure bill if it's all about privatizing bridges and roads as the GOP prefers.
3. Killing the ACA mandate was not in itself a proper fix, and every insurer and responsible professional organization in the country said so.
4. The sound of share buybacks is not the sound of building new stuff. It's the sound of the rich getting richer and the sound of oligarchies consolidating ownership.
1. I agree with you on that one. Start cutting spending, not calling the slowed down rate of rise a “cut”. (I.e. “we were going to raise spending by 10%, and now we’re only raising it by 8%, so that’s a 2% cut, or if we look at it as a percentage, that’s a 20% cut!!!”
2. Predictions are the ultimate in vapor ware.
3. From my perspective, killing the mandate was critical. Forcing someone to buy something they don’t want as a condition of being alive is immoral. Comparing it to car insurance is a non-sequitur, as I don’t need car insurance to live in this country. Lots of people in New York City don’t have cars, and don’t need auto insurance. Then again, it’s hard to have a discussion with words, such as “proper” and hypotheticals. I prefer to look at the cause and effects of things in the past, and apply them to the policies of today. Here is my non-vapor ware solution: “The Affordable Care Act is repealed, effective 1/1/2019.” 8 words.
4. Again, predictions. Apple said they’d build more stuff, hire 20,000 people, and give their employees $2,500 in share options (correct me if I’m wrong on that, or if it’s a share grant - doing this from memory)
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Uhhh...source?
When taxes were cut in the mid 60s, revenue plateaued. When taxes were cut in the early 80s, government revenue dropped for a few years before climbing again at about the same rate it was previously. When taxes were cut again in the mid 80s revenue did not increase in any measurable rate. When taxes were raised a little in the mid 90s, the rate of revenue increased somewhat. Tax cuts in early 2000s don't seem to have done much...hard to say since they were during a period of large revenue drop post 9/11, with revenue starting to increase again a few years later much like it was previously. Revenue increased substantially throughout Obama's tenure, even though we were being "taxed to death".
Your graph pretty much shows it. Those periods of revenue drop are when we had recessions, and I should have been more specific in the period of time after the tax cuts. One bad thing about using that graph is the exponential nature of it, so it shows the early years very flat.
However, my statement about revenue growth was meant to counter those that use the “business” analogy of not having enough money, and lowering revenue to show how silly that line of thinking (“lowering taxes lowers income to the government”) is. Using the Laffer Curve, lowering taxes really can raise revenue.
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Not according to my sources. More money came in but it did not make up for the decrease in tax revenue i.e. a net loss.
I’m trying to understand that. Did that mean that the increased economic activity after the tax cut would have meant more money coming in, but with the tax cut, more dollars came in, but it wasn’t the amount that would have been realized had there been no tax cut?
I think if that is the case, it is an argument of cause and effect where we disagree.
If I understand you (as I put before), then the increased economic activity is not related to the tax cut, and my position is that the tax cut was the reason for the increased economic activity.
Who is right? It depends on whose side you’re on, and the Internet isn’t going to solve this one.
This would be like me saying that had Romney won, I would have been up 40% in my retirement in 2013 instead of 26%. (Doing this from memory, but 6/8 years between 2009-2016 were positive, and the negative ones were in the low single digits.)
