@“Cardinal Fang” heck no wages won’t go up. Now those who are in management may get bigger bonuses , but the worker bees nah, they will get the usual crappy raise. Heck apparently there is a worker shortage now and there has not be an appreciable increase in wages to attract talent.
Paul Ryan has the audacity to say we need to have more kids, when they are doing everything to make having kids more expensive. He says it’s the fix we need for Medicare and social security.
He could also raise the base in social security to shore it up but that would be a “tax increase” on his donors. Mind you we would be affected but I don’t have a problem with that. Yes half the year our take home pay is higher but I never budget to the few extra hundred we get for part of the year.
http://www.newsweek.com/paul-ryan-wants-you-have-more-kids-749328
I cannot tell if the speaker is taunting or just hopelessly self unaware.
You know how we could get more kids and younger people in our country? Immigration.
Birth rates are declining is pretty much all countries. So good luck with encouraging people to have more kids. Immigration is best hope for continuing social safety nets going forward.
@saillakeerie, I’m afraid you’re mistaken. It’s true that with 24/7 news coverage and social media, it’s harder to hide bad news than in the past. But a late Friday drop is still the very best time to do it because that’s still when the fewest people are paying attention. And every politician knows it.
On the weekends most people turn their attention to friends, family, recreational activities, shopping, and household chores. Television viewership is by far the lowest on Fridays and Saturdays—and much of that is focused on sports. Cable news shows often make the top 25 most-viewed cable programs for the week—but only on Monday, Tuesday, and sometimes Wednesday nights, never Friday or Saturday. Newspaper circulation is by far the lowest on Saturdays. There’s still a quite pronounced up-and-down cycle. There’s also usually less news to report and to follow on the weekends because many key institutions and newsmakers do most of their work on weekdays. Consequently the news-gathering capacity of both print and electronic media is at a low point on the weekend, commensurate with the typically lighter flow of news. And when there is big news to report on the weekend, it’s the B-team that’s reporting it, which also depresses weekend television news viewership to some extent.
Corker is a yes?? So much for the last of the principled Senatorial deficit hawks…
I’m sure “the forgotten man” is dancing in the streets with his $5 a paycheck increase. Gonna buy himself a brand new set of wheels, I hear.
Here is a 538 article about what effective tax rates companies in various industries pay under current law:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-gops-corporate-tax-cut-may-not-be-as-big-as-it-looks/
It references this table:
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/taxrate.htm
Sigh… I guess they’re gonna pass this travesty of a bill…
Did they keep the brackets in the senate bill, does anyone know?
This is off topic and political.
Here’s a respected economist, arguing just last year, that we worry far too much about the national debt.
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/10/22/debt-diversion-distraction/
@roethlisburger, and Paul Krugman still argues that. Either today or yesterday he argued that the amount of increase of the debt is not the problem.
The problem is when we increase the debt, why, and how we spend the funds. How does society benefit from the increase in the debt?
I do not see this consistency with the GOP.
Editted. The article was on the twelfth.
Well…it’s after 5:30…any news?
Deficit spending can be a very good thing - like when the economy is in recession - like we were in 2008. The reason it’s taken so long for the economy to recover is because the deficit hawks wouldn’t fund any programs that would have injected much need money into the economy, at a time it was desperately needed. Now the economy is doing much better and that is exactly the wrong time to increase the deficit by cutting taxes on the wealthy, because that money doesn’t make it into the economy and at the same time decreases federal revenue. A much more effective way would have been to give the huge tax breaks to the middle class who would actually put the money right back into the economy and raise taxes on the wealthy.
Corporations are already sitting on huge piles of cash thanks to ridiculously low interests rates and they have no intention on investing that money in business expansion, raises in wage or hiring - especially since we are basically at zero unemployment. Now they will have even more cash to use to buy back their stock.
People who believe this bill is going to be good for their ecominc well being (unless extremely wealthy who will just save their extra millions) have been played.
Now the government will have no choice but to cut programs - especially the ones that put the money right back into the economy - like food stamps and AFDC, social security, Medicaid and Medicare,
There will also be no money for desperately needed infrastructure (which also puts billions of dollars into the economy.)
There will also be limited means for the Fed govt. to prop up the economy when the next big recession strikes ( and it will strike) as the amt of money the fed must pay in interest on the debt will be an even bigger part of the federal budget.
When the economy is strong it’s the time to raise taxes on the wealthy, not cut them.
We are living in BizzaroWorld though where up is down and down is up.
I was feeling down again last night. I re-read the appendix to 1984, “The Principles of Newspeak”
The two works are in no way related, but I was reminded of another title.
“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”
(Editted to add that Orwell’s prescient appendix is the work of genius if that wasn’t clear.)
The tax bill is doubleplus ungood.
And closer to the topic, the bill is out: 1097 pages on a Holiday Weekend.
http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20171218/CRPT-115HRPT-466.pdf
doubleplus secret taxpol
@Dave_N do they consider Hanukkah a holiday in Congress? If not…what holiday weekend is it?
I’d open that link but I suspect it’s written in gobbledygook.
Most states will also have to raise taxes (whether by increasing the state income taxes, or sales tax or gas taxes, or tolls, etc. as there will be massive cuts in money coming to the states from the federal government for programs. So any savings from a break the lower and middle classes see will just be eaten up in new state and local taxes. Most people don’t understand that happens when the Federal govt cuts programs that rely on a certain percentage coming from the Fed. Govt. And states are required to have a balanced budget unlike the Federal government.
@bclintonk I think you are still living at least 10-15 years in the past (particularly with repeated references to the “evening news” and newspapers). But lets say you are correct in today’s world. There will be little, to no, coverage tonight and over the weekend. Whatever coverage there is will be lousy because the B team is on the field. And no one will pay any attention to whatever lousy B-team coverage exists because they will be busy doing other things. I don’t think any of that is true (except for the no one is paying attention part but I will address that more below). But lets roll with it anyway.
Vote on the bill is expected next week. What do you think will happen when the A team returns to work Monday morning (and here I will go with you and say the A team takes the entire weekend off and does nothing work related until Monday morning though I also disagree that is the case)? Do you think they will say nothing about the tax bill because it was released at 5:30 pm on a Friday and is thus “old news”? I expect we will see full 24/7 coverage (in addition to what we will see over the weekend). And that coverage will continue through the votes in both Houses and until the bill is signed into law (and for a long time thereafter in many, many media/online/social media outlets).
In terms of people paying attention, I think that something that almost everyone I know who pays close attention to politics is that the majority of people don’t. They pay some attention to it every for 4 years for a few weeks and even less attention to it in non-presidential election years. For those people, it doesn’t matter when political news is released (other than in that extremely narrow window when they are paying attention). They won’t pay attention to it. But if anyone is interested in talking about, hearing about, debating, etc. what is in the tax bill, I expect there will be ample opportunity over the weekend to do so. We have a 150+ page thread on a board (that purportedly doesn’t allow political discussions) talking about the bill. And its not the only thread here doing that.