TRUMP 2016

[Enoch the Red]

Poor decisions like wasting money on smokes, alcohol and lottery tickets seem like a major cause for people to remain in poverty.

You can find lots of people who are well off who waste money on cigarettes, booze, and gambling. Those things are neither necessary or sufficient predictors of poverty. Now, are those great choices in general? I personally don't believe so. I also think that a person can do everything that I believe to be right and still end up in poverty - just as someone can do everything wrong and still be wealthy.

Are there people in a poverty of their own making? Absolutely. Are there people who are successful because of their hard work, dedication, and strength of character. Absolutely. However the reverse is also true.

[Lewkowski]

You can find lots of people who are well off who waste money on cigarettes, booze, and gambling. Those things are neither necessary or sufficient predictors of poverty. Now, are those great choices in general? I personally don't believe so. I also think that a person can do everything that I believe to be right and still end up in poverty - just as someone can do everything wrong and still be wealthy.

Are there people in a poverty of their own making? Absolutely. Are there people who are successful because of their hard work, dedication, and strength of character. Absolutely. However the reverse is also true.

If you have extra money to spend and you spend them on vices, it isn't dramatically negatively impacting your standard of living. However if you DON'T have extra money to spend...

While people making poor choices can still become wealthy - those who have a habit of doing so likely end up going to prison, drug ODing, having failures in other areas of life (relationships, friendships, health). Being born into money certainly *helps* but I think that cushion is less important than the life lessons you are taught by parents who aren't shitty people.

[Steely Glint]

Everything you just said is refuted by Donald Trump.

[Loki]

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...trump-tax-plan

Not that this will persuade the Lewks of the world, but 100% of polled economists said Trump's tax plan would work as advertised.

[RandBlade]

Question A at the end is stupidly phrased:
"Since 1980, whenever substantial growth effects have been required to make a tax reform plan revenue neutral, the actual outcome has invariably been a fall in tax revenue as a share of GDP."

No shit Sherlock of course it has, by design. Both the UK and the USA managed to run budget surpluses in the 1990s with tax rates considerably lower than they were in 1980 and yes tax revenues lower as a share of GDP. But the idea of tax cuts to spur growth as has happened before is not to increase tax revenues as a share of GDP. It is to grow GDP and for tax revenues to increase in real terms even if they are smaller as a share of GDP

If you can't even get that right, doesn't fill me with confidence that this is anything other than trolling.

[Loki]

Um, that's precisely the GOP claim.

[RandBlade]

Source please.

I thought the claim was that lower tax rates means higher GDP means higher tax revenues. That 30% of a lot beats 50% of not much.

Not lower tax rates means ??? means higher tax as share of GDP.

[Loki]

Did you miss Question B there? No one talks about taxes in terms of GDP. No one even knows what percentage of GDP current taxes make up.

[RandBlade]

I'm not objecting to question B, I'm objecting to question A.

"Since 1980, whenever substantial growth effects have been required to make a tax reform plan revenue neutral, the actual outcome has invariably been a fall in tax revenue as a share of GDP."

[Loki]

Do you expect growth to replace hundreds of billions a year in taxes?

[RandBlade]

Depends where we are on the Laffer curve. In the long term possibly yes. I don't expect it to grow the tax share of GDP as Question A asks though.

[Loki]

Except there's A) literally no evidence for the Laffer curve at current tax levels, and B) you'd need double-digit economic growth to make up for that shortfall. Are you seriously suggesting that's on the cards?

[RandBlade]

A) What evidence do you demand without a crystal ball? As far as corporation tax is concerned there is plenty of evidence that cutting taxes raises revenue which is why nations like the UK and Eire have considerably lower corporation taxes. And why trillions of dollars of cash is being offshored away from America in order to avoid your punitively high corporation tax rates. Between the top 5 tech companies in America alone there is literally about $1.5 trillion of cold hard cash IIRC being held offshore away from the IRS in order to avoid corporation tax. Cut it to 15% with a carrot and stick agreement with those companies and that can be onshored and 15% of $1.5 trillion goes a very long way to cutting your deficit.

B) Double-digit growth sounds incredulous until you think that in the long-term it is <1% growth per annum. Yes I do seriously think that can be on the cards, don't you?

Low taxes and controlled expenditure works, its been demonstrated time and again historically.

[Loki]

A) What evidence do you demand without a crystal ball? As far as corporation tax is concerned there is plenty of evidence that cutting taxes raises revenue which is why nations like the UK and Eire have considerably lower corporation taxes. And why trillions of dollars of cash is being offshored away from America in order to avoid your punitively high corporation tax rates. Between the top 5 tech companies in America alone there is literally about $1.5 trillion of cold hard cash IIRC being held offshore away from the IRS in order to avoid corporation tax. Cut it to 15% with a carrot and stick agreement with those companies and that can be onshored and 15% of $1.5 trillion goes a very long way to cutting your deficit.

B) Double-digit growth sounds incredulous until you think that in the long-term it is <1% growth per annum. Yes I do seriously think that can be on the cards, don't you?

Low taxes and controlled expenditure works, its been demonstrated time and again historically.

A) The burden on proof is on those making a claim. Where's your evidence that the Laffer Curve applies under current conditions?

B) If you cut taxes by a third, and this increases economic growth by 1%, it would take 45 years before the government takes in as much in taxes as it did before; it would take even longer to make up for the 45 years of losses (plus interest). If growth goes up 2% (a claim that has no basis in reality), it would take 23 years. Isn't math fun?

[Aimless]

Pfft. Effective US corporate income tax rate can hardly be described as being "punitive".

[RandBlade]

Why not? Compared to rates of 15% in other nations 35% is extremely high, one of the highest in the western world.

That the system is so convoluted with lots of loopholes that this proposal says should be closed is no defence to that.

[RandBlade]

Your point being?

That the system is so convoluted with lots of loopholes that this proposal says should be closed is no defence to that.

[Aimless]

Effective corporate income tax in the US is not 35%.

[Aimless]

The point being that, cost of tax-dodging notwithstanding, it is the effective corporate income tax that is the most relevant when discussing tax revenue and it should also be the most interesting figure when trying to determine whether or not a tax reform measure will be revenue neutral or even increase revenue due to increased growth. Further, if the effective tax is comparable to other G7 countries then it's absurd to describe the income tax rate itself as being "punitive".

If the effective income tax rate is far lower than the statutory 35% then lowering the statutory income tax rate to the same level as the current effective income tax rate should have negligible impact on growth. Given that there would likely remain a number of loopholes--old ones or new--it should lead to an even lower effective income tax rate. You might assert that this would boost growth enough to offset the loss in revenue but the evidence for that remains equivocal at best.

[Ominous Gamer]

 Wisconsin’s Voter-ID Law Suppressed 200,000 Votes in 2016 (Trump Won by 22,748)

 Prior to the 2016 election, Eddie Lee Holloway Jr., a 58-year-old African-American man, moved from Illinois to Wisconsin, which implemented a strict voter-ID law for the first time in 2016. He brought his expired Illinois photo ID, birth certificate, and Social Security card to get a photo ID for voting in Wisconsin, but the DMV in Milwaukee rejected his application because the name on his birth certificate read “Eddie Junior Holloway,” the result of a clerical error when it was issued. Holloway ended up making seven trips to different public agencies in two states and spent over $200 in an attempt to correct his birth certificate, but he was never able to obtain a voter-ID in Wisconsin. Before the election, his lawyer for the ACLU told me he was so disgusted he left Wisconsin for Illinois.

[Aimless]

Move along, nothing to see here, rules of the game etc etc.

[Timbuk2]

Yeah, but to be fair Wisconsin has only just discovered the printed word and typewriting. These weird concepts like "Drivers license" are strange and alien.

[LittleFuzzy]

President Trump: Wisconsin voter-id law stopped 200,000 fraudulent voters!

(actually, the analysis OG quoted isn't on a much higher level than the above. Though I'd be willing to be that the real numbers *which we will never know, granted* would still have changed the result there. Not that Wisconsin flipping would have changed the outcome)

[Loki]

And Comey is gone.

[LittleFuzzy]

He's been fired for his mishandling of the Clinton email investigation. . .
Bannon's got chutzpah, you gotta give him that.

edit: Ok, more seriously recent testimony is being falsely interpreted to justify demands that he should have prosecuted members of the Clinton campaign and his failure to do so is the reason he's been fired. So this actually plays into the unhappiness from last summer where lots of rank-and-file FBI were upset he wasn't doing so. Trump has "just now" noticed that discontent and has concluded Comey can't effectively lead the FBI.

Whether it actually is the reason or not, it will have a chilling effect on the Russia investigation and I think it's likely the GOP will let him give it to a toady which means things will go absolutely nowhere. I hate saying it since establishing one is guaranteed to go off the rails but we now need a special prosecutor.

[RandBlade]

Disconcerting to see the executive fire the head of a key part of the criminal justice system for not having arrested his political opponent. WTF America?

[Steely Glint]

Disconcerting to see the executive fire the head of a key part of the criminal justice system, in charge of running an investigation on him, for not having arrested his political opponent. WTF America?

FTFY

[Steely Glint]

Classic Fox News there.

[Ominous Gamer]

Twitter Link

[Ominous Gamer]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/09/politi...sia/index.html

Not suspecious, not at all.