Probably 5 minutes before the vote. Or maybe 5 minutes after. They don’t seem too interested in sharing details.
The Democrats in the conference committee were not allowed to see the legislation. Let me say that again. The conference committee has concluded, they have produced a bill and it has been signed off on, and the Democrats still have not seen it.
^ Right-click on the link and “Open link in incognito window” for Chrome or “Open link in new private window” on Firefox, that gets around the paywall.
Just saw something that said the refundability (refundableness?) of the $2K child tax credit has been raised to 70% from 55%, which will give up to $300 more per kid back to poorer families.
This is apparently enough to buy Rubio’s support.
@“Cardinal Fang” I am not seeing that on any news site. Can you give me your source?
While I do not support the tax bill, the NY Times looked at the data and drew the completely wrong conclusions. Europe has less inequality because most people are considerably poorer than in the US, and when everyone is poor you don’t have much inequality.
Here is one article which describes how the US middle class earns far more than in Europe.
This is not an accident. The US system rewards capitalism by taking a smaller share of what people earn, making it attractive for entrepreneurs to take the considerable risk of failure in search of success. Clearly, the rich in the US do far better than anywhere else. But the US is more innovative as a result, and this in turn leads to an economy where 80%+ of the US population is better off being in the US than in Europe.
This can be seen in one the graphs in the NY Times article. Take a look at the 2016 Global Income percentiles. If you look at the US and Canada section, you will see that about 2/3rds of the US and Canada population is above the 99th percentile of global income. Yes folks, you are probably in the 1%.
In contrast, perhaps only about 1/3rd of Europe’s population is in the top 1% of global income. The rest make considerably less than their US counterpart.
The failure of the US system is not for the vast majority that do as well or better than the European counterpart. It is for those at the bottom, for which a stronger safety net is needed but unavailable. But since tax rates are low for everyone in the US compared to Europe, providing that safety net would mean increasing taxes on everyone, but most people in the US would resist that.
You are misinterpreting this graph.
What is graph means is that the US has about 30% of the world’s 1%'ers.
With a global population of 7 billion or so, 1% would be 70 million. 2/3 of US+Canada is around 250 million people.
Please don’t derail my thread. I understand the need to discuss income inequality but a detailed discussion needs its own thread
Thx
So the Republicans signed off on the bill without letting Democrats see it. I heard that after the signing off they were letting Democratic congressmembers, but not their staffs, to go in a room and cast a glimpse at the 503 page bill. . This is a sham and a circus.
@“Cardinal Fang” I’m so angry this is so foul. The shenanigans that are taking place stink. The party in the majority won’t always be and this will just make a new majority act just as childish. I’m so angry that they are passing legislation that will literally affect every American and they won’t let their peers see it.
Yeah, it stinks when that happens. Really, it does.
The bill will be released at 5:30 pm eastern time. As of now, Democratic staff have not been allowed to see it.
I don’t believe I am misinterpreting it, but I probably needed to explain my interpretation better.
The light blue at the top shows the distribution of the US and Canada population among income percentiles. We can compare relative areas of just this band to see where most of the US earning population resides. Visually, we can see there is far more area beyond the 99th percentile than there is below the 99th percentile. This leads to the conclusion that over half of the US population is in the top 1%.
Has the entire Republican party seen it? Or just committee members?
The label on the left side says “Share of population (Within each global income group)” , it is not an absolute number, it’s a percentage. So at the 99th percentile line, about 35% of people in the 1% are US/Canada. However, 1% by definition can only total 1% of the world’s population, which is about 76 million people. It’s not mathematically possible for 2/3 of US+Canada, which is around 250 million people, to all be in a percentile that contains only 76 million people.
Second - the scale on the bottom is not linear. Notice that the 99th and up percentile incorporates 3/13 (23%) of the graph area. You cannot make any judgments about area because of this.
You are using full populations whereas the graph clearly refers to working population as otherwise there would be a massive section at zero income. But you are right that it makes it difficult to compare. So here is another article that shows the majority of US workers are in the top 1% worldwide:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/050615/are-you-top-one-percent-world.asp
This article estimates that everyone with an income greater than $32,400 a year is in the top 1% worldwide.
Classic. Anytime a politician wants to bury bad news, they release it late on a Friday. That way there’s not enough time for television journalists to digest it for Friday evening news broadcasts, it gets buried in Saturday newspapers which hardly anyone reads, and most people are too busy with their weekends to pay much attention to what little news coverage there is. Then by the time Monday rolls around it’s “old news” so there’s only minimal coverage.
This says to me these guys are deeply embarrassed by the awfulness of this bill and they don’t want anyone to see it or hear about it in any detail because it’s indefensible on public policy grounds and politically a loser, too, if people know what’s in it. Their attempts to cover it up remind me of the way my dog paws at the ground trying to cover up the pile of you-know-what he just left.
Is there a comparison based not on income but on Purchasing Power Parity? If you live in the US and have an income of $20,000 a year, you are not comparable to someone who lives in India or Norway and has that income, in terms of what services the government provides and what you can buy.
Good question @“Cardinal Fang”. I did a bit of searching and found this WaPo article, which is a bit old. It says that the median US income in 2011 was at the 93%tile worldwide, when using PPP.
Both of those countries are interesting but for different reasons. Norway is an extreme outlier because of its oil wealth. But note that even though you include Norway in Europe to calculate European incomes, Europeans as a whole still make considerably less to begin with, and then pay a much higher percentage of income taxes. But the person making $20K per year in Europe will likely be better off due to the social services.
And when it comes to India and China, subsistence living can be cheap, but big-ticket items like cars and homes can be quite expensive.
That was my point about Norway or really any Northern European country: people at the bottom are better off than people at the bottom here, because the welfare state gives them things: paid leave, paid childcare, stuff like that.