I'm so tired of this decades-old Voodoo economics bullshit. Just be honest and say you don't give a shit about ordinary Americans. That would make the whole conversation easier and more honest.
Conversely, we could try not assuming the intentions of posters and acknowledge that while different people may disagree, there are different thoughts on policies necessary to improve all our lives
First of all, it's not "taxpayers" keeping more of their own money, it's rich people. They get the lion's share of the benefit from this bill.
Of course it is taxpayers. Whether you pay $10 in federal tax or $10 million you are still a tax payer. Although, ironically the people who are choosing not to work but apply for Medicaid actually are not taxpayers.
It should not be surprising that a more wealthy person usually will save more of their money when a tax rate lowers—because they pay more taxes to begin with. The question that no one really seems to have a good answer for is why is that bad? It’s not like rich people are like the cartoon Scrooge McDuck—keeping all of their money in a huge vault just so they can swim around in it.
The vast wealth of today’s rich are reinvested in other enterprises so that they can offer new products to the people, build new stores, and—perhaps most overlooked—hire more people. It is not a sin to be rich.
The idea that revenue to GDP stays fixed like some law of physics is nonsense. That number is the product of decades of policy choices constrained by political forces
Drastically increasing the debt to fund tax cuts for the rich does not magically become free just because past Congresses kept things hovering around 17%. That average is not guaranteed to continue.
Law of averages over the last some 80 years would suggest that it’s a good planning metric.
But didn’t state that the revenue/GDP ratio is static. What I pointed out is that the average since 1946 has been 17%. And the norm is that it will fluctuate between 16-18% regardless of tax policy. When you run a Pearson’s Moment Correlation test, you will find no statistically significant correlation between top marginal tax rates and the revenue-GDP ratio.
Simply looking at tax policy and determining the government will or will not earn more revenue is impossible.
This is what makes how the CBO does their projections so skewed. Not because they are not competent—I assume they are very competent. But because since congress created the CBO in 1974, it has been instructed to use static scoring. The reason for this was so the results could not be used to justify tax cuts.
But instead we see that it has been used to justify more spending. If Congress raises taxes, CBO scores this as sure to create more revenue. Thus, Congress has the free hand to spend more money. Example, while the revenue-GDP on average has remained the same, spending-GDP had increased since 1974 from 18% to 23%.
Static scoring is inappropriate because you are trying to assess not a mechanical system but an organic system where the system reacts in multiple and often unexpected ways.
If static scoring worked, President Bush’s luxury tax designed to specifically target the rich by taxing items such as yachts would have led to increased revenue. Instead, it ultimately lost revenue while having the additional feature of single-handedly
destroying the American Yacht industry which was a world leader and now is largely gone
More over this law saves nearly a half trillion over 10 years due to offsetting spending cuts. The revenue next year will not be less than last year simply because the 2017 tax cuts were extended.
Nor did the 2017 tax cuts result in the following years collecting less revenue than the years before the tax cuts. Federal revenue increases each year after the tax cuts.
Tax cuts for the rich do not pay for themselves. We eventually pay for them, either through higher debt, lower benefits and services to ordinary Americans, or both. And all this magical thinking you are doing cannot change the basic truth: at some point, someone has to clean up the mess.
I didn’t say they pay for themselves. What I have shown is that there isn’t a correlation between tax policy and revenue as a percentage of GDP and that the 2017 tax cuts did not result in a reduction of revenue compared to preceding years. Extending them now will have no impact on revenue from last year and even if revenues be lowered due to the new taxes—we’ll see—spending has been cut to offset the impact on debt.
Ok. I’m traveling and will likely be off the net for the next week or so. If this is still brewing I’ll be back. Take care.
