“People … at all income levels” is not an exclusive statement, it’s an inclusive one. Are people at all income levels getting a cut? Yes. Are most people at all income levels getting a cut? Yes. Are some people at all income levels getting a hike? Yes. Are most of the people getting a hike upper income with SALT deductions? Yes. Facts are facts. No one is moving goalposts.
Yes, 10 million is a lot, but I ask again, why are you pretending to care about them? You have been saying for pages how rich people shouldn’t get a tax cut. How many of those 10 million are high income earners?
There is more than just “sharing their tax-cut wealth with employees” i.e. raises and bonuses. There’s also investment and expansion which means new jobs. Count those companies and you’ve got way more than 46.
It’s not pretending, that I’m not greedy enough to want to benefit from a tax cut at the expense of taxes going up A LOT on millions and millions and millions and millions of hard-working Middle-class Americans.
Obviously you weren’t paying attention. Less than 10% of the tax cut temporarily goes to some of the Middle-Class, with more than 90% going to the Rich & Corporate.
Most of the people who’s taxes are going up are not “middle-class Americans.” They’re high income earners that are losing their large state and local income tax deduction.
You can’t have an across the board tax cut without the vast majority of the cut going to the people who pay the vast majority of the taxes, so I’m fine with 90% of the cut going to the rich and corporate as long as it gets more people taking the standard deduction and allowing them to keep more of their money. Plus, I wanted a lower corporate rate, so why would I be upset if corporations get a huge chunk of the cut?
We’ll see what happens, but I predict at least 30% of the Fortune 500 will increase jobs, expand, and/or raise wages/give bonuses in 2018. We’ll check back next year and see who was right.
Plus the people who get tax cuts are getting pretty big ones on a relative basis, while many of the few people who are getting increases are not getting very large increases.
B) As the quite typical example I posted upthread, the law enforcement individual stated he has been doing his taxes for more than 20 years, and he will be paying more than $3K more in taxes every year going forward.
Haha, yeah. Extremely conservative estimate, but @JoeFriday is so anti-capitalism that he’ll argue with something so basic as “large businesses will continue getting larger.”
I’m not going to go through all 800 posts in this thread, but there are at least 2 graphs posted in the past few hundred posts that illustrate that there are small percentages of taxpayers across the board getting tax hikes, and the high earners (over $80,000) are more likely than low earners to see a hike.
Income inequality (with no other qualifier) is not necessarily a bad thing. Considering we’re one of the richest countries in the world, I would argue that income inequality is a neccessary component of a wealthy nation.
Yes, you mentioned that, then I pointed out that the percentage of PROFITABLE corporations that don’t pay taxes is much, much lower.
Change nothing but raise the exemptions and increase EITC amounts would have tilted the savings to the low and middle class and most of the cut would have gone to the working / middle class.
Which businesses have done that? So far, the only wage increases (as opposed to bonuses) I’ve seen are very obviously attributable to normal market pressure, just dressed up to make it appear to be a result of the tax cuts. The same goes with the expansion announcements.
Income inequality is measurable. While it’s true that not everyone makes the same income under any known economic system (even under soviet communism there were variations in salaries), extreme income inequality is not a necessary component.
I should have been more precise and said “an across the board tax rate cut”
I don’t think that what you describe is really an “across the board tax cut” either
Do you talk to small business owners? I have talked to several that have been sitting on the sidelines waiting for a more business friendly administration and tax policy before committing to expansion.
Agreed. See my comment above about how conservative an estimate that is and how it was made just to push Joe’s buttons.
Define extreme. I wouldn’t define what we have as extreme. However, I do believe that extreme levels can lead to political destabilization, so there is a point that it can become a negative. But a decent amount of income inequality is necessary. I don’t know what that number is, however.
No actual citable sources? Businesses expand when they see market opportunities they believe will provide an acceptable and competitive ROI. “There’s now (or I believe there will be) more demand for widgets, so I’m going to invest in a new widget factory” is what happens, not “My corporate/pass-through income taxes (which are on profits) were cut, so I’m going to invest in a new factory to build more widgets regardless of whether there is any demand for them.” (The scraps thrown to the middle class probably will result in more demand in general, but the overall policy is very poor.)
If the business owners you say you talk to saw such opportunities and had the ability to act on them, but decided not to because they wanted to wait for a vague “more business-friendly administration and tax policy,” they’re not very good businesspeople.
I can probably contrive a tax “rate” cut that would not disproportionately benefit the high income earners too.
Cut the top rate by .0001% and cut the bottom rate in half. Maybe.
How is increasing the exemption not an “across the board tax cut” ?
Not that this line of argument matters really. I was just making the point that tax cuts don’t necessarily have to go mostly to the rich. You can cut taxes that benefit the low income and middle income more.
How about we just abolish gasoline taxes? Theres a tax cut that isn’t tilted to the rich.
Many businesses were waiting because it was very likely there would be changes to the tax system. Most didn’t want to make decisions without knowing what the tax bill would look like. So yes, lots of businesses were sitting and waiting to see what happened with the new bill. You’re free to call them “not very good businesspeople” and you may be right, but that’s what they were doing.
Oh, the claim from lobbyists and trade groups that deregulation and tax cuts will make everyone rich – that’s a new one (/s). Who cares if our tap water isn’t safe to drink or our air is insanely polluted, right? (And while you might call that an exaggeration, there are deregulatory changes mentioned in that NYT article that I am familiar with and know are not even remotely in the public interest.)
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