Tax changes / proposals - discussion

It does exclude people making “less than minimum wage” such as waiters.

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Interesting. They also do note that it doesn’t count increases in the minimum wage itself. so if your raises were only due to the MW going up then you aren’t considered to get a raise.

You claimed that :

How are you defining political agenda?

The sources you list don’t really seem really unbiased in their views.
Buchanan is a noted libertarian and member of Cato.
Leonard wrote a book claiming progressivism was rooted in racial science and eugenics. 5 star reviews: "A detailed book on how Liberals created the mess of a world we live in today. "
The 2nd link there is for a 50 year old article from a chemist.

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Long overdue!

A fan of regressive taxation, eh ?

Not generally, but I make an exception for things that are bad for health and/or environment, like alcohol, tobacco, and dinosaurs.

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Feel free to propose a better system that generally charges more for heavier users, but is also an acceptable implementation.

When are they raising the national tobacco tax? It should have a way to discourage people from simply trading down to cheaper alternatives; ie. a block tax.

Those people aren’t making minimum wage. The tips are income. They also tend to get raises on par with inflation, since most people get a tip based on a %-age of revenue, and they tend to move to other restaurants as they get experience.

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Not for me it wouldn’t. And it’s not even close.

Obviously it’s an aggregate of the Middle-Class. However, if you would experience little impact, that by default means someone else would experience an even larger impact than the mean.

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OOPS !

According to a new Morning Consult poll, most voters aren’t noticing more money in their paychecks under the new tax law.

Among employed voters – those working in the private and public sectors, plus those who are self-employed – 53% said they haven’t noticed an uptick on their pay stubs.

For those earning more than $100,000, 40% said they noticed a pay increase [DUH!]. Conversely, only 33% of voters who earn between $50,000 and $100,000 and 16% of voters who earn under $50,000 said the same.

Mission Accomplished. NOT.

I’m not sure what your point is other than to discuss the political fallout from the tax cuts. This thread was much more useful when people were discussing the financial impacts of the tax bill (including impact to home prices)

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Sorry, but if you don’t think there’s a “financial impact” there, I’m afraid you need a remedial course in economics.

Voters not paying attention to their pay stub has no bearing on the actual changes to the tax they owe. I know my healthcare premium increase hit the same pay period as the witholding changes, so there wasn’t much difference in net pay.

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““Taxpayers in the bottom quintile (those with income less than $25,000) would see an average tax cut of $60, or 0.4 percent of after-tax income. Taxpayers in the middle income quintile (those with income between about $49,000 and $86,000) would receive an average tax cut of about $900, or 1.6 percent of after-tax income.” Spread out across 52 or 26 paychecks, those changes could be easy to overlook, especially as health care costs continue to rise.”

so for the bottom 40% of earners a $1-15 increase in weekly paychecks could easily be overlooked or eaten up by other increases especially the health insurance premiums like FWF4Lyfe pointed out.

I myself am seeing ~$250/month increase in take home.

I noticed a drop in withholding, except I know it will all be eaten up by missing deductions when I file next year.

Thats a good video.

Summary points for those who don’t want to spend 8 minutes :

One measure of middle income is down -6% adjusted for inflation with CPI-U since the 70’s when looking at non supervisory workers. However if you use PCE measure for the inflation instead then its UP by +17%

Another measure of the middle quintile average incomes adjusted with PCE then they see a decrease of -7%
2 things. First they exclude benefits and only count wages. Benefits are up more in the time.
Also that includes people 65+ years old and retirees aren’t really expected to see increases from economic growth and the % of retirees in the population has almost doubled in that time. If you exclude the 65+ group and/or look at households with children then you get a increase of +20-23%.

But at best you’re looking at ~23% over 3 decades. Thats not stagnation but its really not great.

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Good summary of the various methods and omissions / complications.

True, but if you think the inflation has been properly accounted for, why would you expect wage growth in the same roles / jobs? In their example of non-supervisory positions, while an individual can move up via promotion, the job role stays the same for the next lower level worker to fill before becoming skilled enough to do something else. I guess the nebulous “productivity gains” the economists talk about might help somehow.

Because productivity is up a lot more than 23% in the same time period. If our economy can do more with less, shouldn’t everyone benefit? Not sure why you think productivity is “nebulous”.