No, this ADDS 1 trillion to the already existing deficit, which the likes of you cried about incessantly just 12 months ago. Now, it doesn't matter, until the tax cuts are on the books. Then all of a sudden the whining about the deficit will start again and the entitlement cut drumbeat will start. This is all so transparent, but has the general populus fooled.
The bill the Senate passed is substantially different from this one. And, where do you get the ridiculous notion that the House and Senate should be passing any legislations that is a "work in progress"????????
These are false and deliberately misleading claims. All of the debt that right wingers attrubute to Obama came from three places. Rapid increases in social spending due to twenty years of ill advised financial deregulation and coddling of the Wall Street casino. Ending the Bush Adminstration fiction of listing the costs of his reckless and bungled Iraq war "off the books" and not counting all that borrow and spend as part of the deficit, and a one time underfunded stimulus bill, which actually worked. Your claim that the Trump tax plan adds $1 trillion to the deficit if there is no GDP growth is totally false. That estimate is based on about a 2% growth figure, and is butressed by another analysis that puts the figure at 1.5 trillion. As we know from the last two times the GOP played the borrow and spend card, the rosy expectations of wildly optomistic economic growth do not offset the cuts in revenue sources. This did not happen with the Reagan or Bush tax cuts. In fact, they didn't even come close. Critics of the Bush tax cuts predicted "deficits as far as the eye could see". And that is precisely what we got. Now, Trump and the GOP are playing that same card again. This is the third time in my lifetime that they have run this particular scam. We already know how it will turn out. Reagan tripled the national debt in eight years, and Bush doubled it again. You can rant about Obama all you want, but he never adopted a policy borrow and spend as a permanent long term strategy. For eight years , we have sat and watched the exact same chorus of right wingers rant and rave about Federal debt and spending. Now that borrow and spend are the offical policy of the Repubcian party and the Trump Administration, all these very same right wingers are demonstrating their usual hypocracy and singing out of the other sides of their mouths again.
Not true. But, social security is going bankrupt and almost nobody will be able to retire unless they have a retirement account or are rich.
What about football players, novelists, television and movie stars? Do they work 30 or 100 times harder that the grips, cameramen, venders, printers or set workers? So do we need to make a law as to how much they can make or how much a business owner can make or an inventor? You can only make as much as someone is willing to pay you. Why do you want to take people's freedom away?
We should stop borrowing. Lower federal government spending to less than the federal revenues and start paying down the debt.
No, it is not. Although right wingers have been telling each other that since I was in high school. All you need to do is remove the cap on top earnings taxation and move the retirement back a couple of years, and the system is sound for the next fifty years.
Why not make is sound from the beginning, FOREVER, starting now, by letting people keep their own money?
Of course, that's the traditional GOP playbook. Cut taxes first to necessitate spending cuts. Starve the beast... The problem is, that if you cut spending to balance the budget, that will be government austerity and will lead to a contraction. My guess is that the GOP doesn't want that. So they'll leave the austerity forced on the next Dem president, to then accuse them of exploding the deficit when the austerity doesn't get instated. Rinse and repeat, we've seen it all before.
If we had Medicare for all the deficit would skyrocket. That's Bernie's wet dream and it's not going to happen. Medicare needs to be earned from years and years of work. Productivity is relative to what our competition produces. If a worker spends an hour or 2 playing around browsing the web and taking personal phone calls, they are not producing what lower wage overseas competitors are.
I don't care what order it gets done, just get it done. We see that Keynesian economics is a disaster doubling the national debt, accumulating more debt by the 44th president that the previous 43 combined. $10 trillion dollars in overspending will bankrupt the country.
That doesn't make it sound. That makes is cease to exist. We already know what that looks like, All we have to do is look at the statistics and stories on poverty amongst the elderly before there was SSA and Medicare. Sorry, but Social Security and Medicare resulted in a drastic reduction in poverty among the elderly (before SSA, the poverty rate amongst the elderly was conservative estimated to be well over 50%, and Medicare was so successful that it actually prolonged people's lives). Why you would want to return to that is beyond me.
I notice there are some interesting tax benefits for golf course owners and winery owners and commercial real estate owners. Hmmmmmmmm.
And what basis do you have for saying that is not true? That WAS the way things were before Social Security. There was no real retsairement, unless you had wealth. Thirty years of conservative thinking has done away with more than half of the nation's defined pension benifits. And there are plenty of studies and facts that indicate that the vast majority of Americans have been unable or unwilling to save enough to provide for an adequate retirement on their own. I has a suspicion that you are one of those rigth wingers who gets his government check every month, has a Medicare card, and takes both of them for granted. And, judging by your rhetoric, you're perfectly fine with taking those benefits away from everyone else.
This bill is VERY good to the commercial real estate industry, just as the first Reagan tax cut turned out to be.
Who exactly is pro-'the Russians' again? The Senate just passed a bill to make oil competition more difficult for Russia. Guess which party opposed it.
Trump has a FAR better record on the Federal debt, so far, than Obama. Obama record first year to date Obama over a $Trillion Trump's Under a 1/2Trillion. Joe Manchin hurts West Virginia The biggest fake in West Virginia politics in my 36 years as a state resident is Joe Manchin. He has pretended to care about coal, guns, and West Virginia University. He has let each one down. And on Friday night/Saturday morning, he showed how little he cares about the people of West Virginia. As governor, Manchin supported cap-and-trade. As a senator, Manchin introduced more gun control. As governor, his appointed the president of WVU brought disgrace to that institution by giving Manchin daughter a degree she did not earn. And now, as senator, he has voted against the Make America Great Again tax cuts. Manchin voted against nearly doubling the standard deduction which 83 percent of state residents use, according to Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. Manchin voted against doubling the child tax credit to $2,000 a child. In a state where 25% of the children live in poverty, that extra $1,000 per child would make a difference. Manchin voted against repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax which hits the middle class hardest. Manchin voted against doubling the teacher deduction to $500, that being the maximum they could deduct for school supplies they buy out of pocket. Finally, Manchin voted against letting West Virginians decide whether or not they want to buy health insurance. Those provisions of the tax cuts would have helped West Virginians. There is nothing in the bill that would harm them. Joe would rather suck up to the Marxists in his party than help the families and children of West Virginia. Let them buy EpiPens, right? http://donsurber.blogspot.com/2017/12/joe-manchin-hurts-west-virginia.html#more Say it aint so, Joe!
You'll have to tell me what you're referring to when you say "productivity" because to me that means the very literal definition of the metrics of efficiency in converting raw materials into finished goods. And in that meaning we are overall more productive then we once were for a variety of reasons from our refined understanding of things like COGS and logistics, to the involvement of technology, to the ability to operate outside of our local market. We're also less productive in some areas due to reasons of labor laws, wage laws, environmental regulations, etc, not isn't to say out net gain isn't usually positive. But I don't see the direct connection between how productivity demands higher wages on the general scale. Conceptually, higher productivity can lead to higher wages on an individual basis but that's more about incentive than it is about the metrics of efficiency. Plus at the end of the day what is the goal of this belief that higher productivity must mean higher wages? In other words, how would such a thing be implemented? If a company has a great year will the government force them to redistribute the profits to all employees? What if a company has a bad year, will they be allowed to pay their employees less or even nothing at all?
Great Points! We are more productive than ever, but our growth in productivity is pretty flat. Increased wages with increased productivity is not inflationary, but, what really drives labor rates is labor demand. Right now the Baby Boomers are retiring and given their long years in the job, they are more productive than their younger replacements.
So do we get our money back for all the years we’ve been paying into social security? Or are they just going to pocket it and make us start from scratch? Privatization, just like in health insurance, means that there will be a for-profit motive which means everything will automatically cost more.
As someone who has worked in both the film and sports industries, you don’t need to tell me about the inequality between the public figures and ones behind the scenes. What most people don’t realize is that movie stars and athletes would not make as much and would not be as popular without the rest of the workers. If you want details on that, I’ll be happy to give them to you. The privileged ones owe it to society to give a little more because they didn’t get to where they are on their own. They will still have way more money than everyone else. Having said that, athletes and actors don’t even make as much as their employers. The problem with you freedom comment is that when you have a few people making more money than they’ll ever need, they can buy laws like we see everyday in Washington. These laws benefit the super rich and screw over the little guy. Why are you ok with that? Does the little guy not deserve freedom too or is it always, “the poor rich people and their lack of freedom”?
Medicare for all costs less than our current system. Every other major country does it. That it would somehow destroy our economy is a lie rooted from the for-profit health insurance companies. Our taxes would go up but then we would no longer pay insurance premiums so at the end of the year, we’d save money and get better and more efficient care. These are proven facts.
