Traitors.

True Patriots fighting for the people of the United States. Outstanding!

You cannot believe that. They are part of rejecting the results of a fair and honest election. The changing of the guard in an adult and honorable way was one of the hallmarks of the American system. It is one we proudly told other nations. Now something that basic and that important was overthrown by Trump. How can anyone be so anti-America as to want that?
 
Recessions follow every tax increase and every year where the tax is not changing

No they don't because Clinton raised taxes in 1993 and the economy went on to its longest expansion period since the 1950's. It didn't turn until Capital Gains Taxes were cut, which prompted the dotcom bubble burst and subsequent recession.
 
Recessions follow every tax increase and every year where the tax is not changing. It all depends on how long you look after the year that it happened. Do you see how ridiculous your argument is? You are not making a valid argument. You are simply pretending that everything bad is caused by what you don't like. That isn't valid science.?

All you're doing is complaining about my argument without offering one of your own.

Show your work.

I have.
 
The chart you posted includes periods of time where we had tax increases.

Yeah, and look at what happened when we did increase taxes...the personal savings rate stopped falling sharply, and the household debt rate stopped growing sharply!

That was during the 90's when...we increased taxes.
 
Obamacare was a compromise.

Hillary Clinton was a compromise.

*Biden* was a compromise.

Sequestration was a compromise.

Democrats compromise all the fucking time and we're expected to handle Conservative egos with kid gloves.

Ive been telling this board the same thing for years........stop compromising with racist!

You win the internet today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
If you listen the Regressive Left will tell you exactly what is coming if they gain the power to force their will.

Act accordingly.

Everybody knows CA, THE West Coast! has the 5Th largest economy in the world. we also know listening to racist white men and their lies is so 2008.

you reign of violence, hatred and terror is comming to an end!
 
It doesn't work as stated. There is validity to the Laffer Curve model, but too many people cherry-picked what they wanted from it and forgot the pitfalls. They never did anything about negative consequences.

That's because the Laffer model isn't a serious economic model, it's a social one.

The idea of cutting taxes and reducing taxation isn't borne of any economic school of thought, it's borne of racism and harming minorities as Lee Atwater so perfectly said:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

I mean, that's the game right there...tax cuts are a social -not fiscal- policy intended to inflict pain on minority groups.
 
It’s falling apart already. Weak-kneed Democrats have already infuriated their base. Biden is already screaming at Civil Rights leaders who played a huge role in his victory and he is appointing the same old tired ass democrats that opened the door for a manic like Trump to become POTUS. Progressives are wondering what the fuck is going on and black voters who saved Biden’s campaign are already feeling betrayed.

It’s falling apart already.

because he's compromising to please the white democrat base. white america has made it clear they are not ready for equality for all.
most white americans dont even want M4ALL.

as long as we have to keep pleasing white america................we cant move forward!
 
Every time I think the Republicans have hit the bottom of the barrel they manage to find a basement under the dungeon in a grave in the pits of hell. Stealing two SCOTUS seats was unforgivable. Electing Trump was the nail in the coffin for me. This attempt to undo the votes of the American people means that these people do not belong in our society. They are enemies of American democracy.

have you ever voted republican?
 
Or Netflix, for that matter. They haven't run a profit since switching to streaming, though their stock price has shot through the roof.

One thing to keep in mind is that only about 50% of all Americans own stock, and 80% of all stock is owned by just the top 10% of people, and about 40% of all stock is owned by just the top 1%.

So when we talk about the stock market or investing "creating wealth", what we're really talking about is how that wealth is really being created and hoarded by a small group of people.

So when so much wealth is concentrated at the top, not being spent in the economy, it falls on everyone else below them to subsidize that wealth hoarding by spending more in the consumer economy by going into debt. We saw this most clearly during the 00's. Wages didn't grow, even though after-tax income did slightly for most people...but that was eaten up by inflation and debt. It's why the personal savings rate plummeted and the household debt rate increased. People were using credit to bridge the gap between what they have to spend, and what they need to spend.

I always like to say that if you give a poor person $1,000, they are going to spend every penny of that money in the economy...but if you give a rich person $50,000, they probably won't spend any more in the economy than the poor person will spend, and will almost assuredly put that money into savings or offshore, where it does no good.

The misconception is that savings translates to investment or loans, but that's not been the case the last decade. The wealthy have also insulated their savings, so when you get a loan from a bank, that bank ain't using the rich person's savings to lend to you.




I would actually prefer if we replaced the Income Tax with a Carbon Tax. We shouldn't be taxing income, we should be taxing waste.

Owning stocks is not the only wealth people can have. I know people that own no stock but their real estate holdings make them a multimillionaire. For most people their largest source of wealth is owning their home.

The thing you don't seem to understand about wealth is it often isn't cash. It is based on an assumption of how much cash items could be sold for based on market conditions. That doesn't make it cash. It makes it paper wealth that can change dramatically if stock markets or real estate markets crash or explode. That is why billionaires in the US lost billions of dollars in Feb/March and then gained billions of dollars back by Oct/November. It isn't because they took all this money out of the system. It is simply because the supply/demand for what they are holding decreased/increased. Jeff Bezos didn't see a $48 billion wealth increase because Amazon sold that much stuff. His shares were suddenly valued at that because some other schmuck was willing to pay $3500 for a share of Amazon rather than $2500. There is no way Bezos could sell all his shares for $3500 because there aren't enough schmucks willing to pay that but because the artifact of how we value stock that is what wealth we declare Bezos has.

If I buy a house for $200,000 and then 2 years later my neighbor who has the exact same house sells his for $400,000 that would mean my house is now valued at $400,000 so I added $200,000 in wealth in 2 years. That is not money I earned or money I saved. It is not cash I have in my pocket. It isn't even real money because in 2 years, the real estate market could crash and my home might be only worth $150,000. This is exactly what happened to some extent from 2000-2010. Real estate prices rose dramatically and then dropped. Yes, it hurt a lot of people but for many, probably most, who were in their homes for the long term it didn't affect how they lived.

Your claim about wealth hoarding causing everyone else to have to spend money to prop up that hoarding is far from true. The way the market works is the more spending on the bottom the more the value of those companies will go up because the more they are selling. Taxing the rich to give to the poor may make the rich only richer if that is all we do.

The problems arise from many different things. Yes, the rich and well to do can pay more in taxes which will help. But we also need to do things to help those on the bottom.
 
According to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and Bush's Working Group on Financial Markets, the turmoil was triggered by the dramatic weakening of underwriting standards for subprime loans, beginning in 2004 and extending through 2007.

“The Presidents Working Group’s March policy statement acknowledged that turmoil in financial markets clearly was triggered by a dramatic weakening of underwriting standards for U.S. subprime mortgages, beginning in late 2004 and extending into 2007.”
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/fin-mkts/Documents/q4progress update.pdf

"Since 1995 there has been essentially no change in the basic CRA rules or enforcement process that can be reasonably linked to the subprime lending activity. This fact weakens the link between the CRA and the current crisis since the crisis is rooted in poor performance of mortgage loans made between 2004 and 2007. "
https://www.federalreserve.gov/images/20081203_analysis.pdf

Who do regulators work for? The Executive Branch. Bush's regulators dramatically weakened underwriting standards for subprime loans with the intention of creating a housing bubble to give the impression that the economy was growing as a result of tax cuts, when it was really growing as a result of debt. That's why Bush the Dumber tied his tax cuts to his housing policy while campaigning in 2004:

Bush Ties Policy to Record Home Ownership
Touting his tax cuts as the economy's savior — and pointing to the strong housing market as proof — Bush said "more people own their own home now than ever." More than 50 percent of minorities owned their own homes in the last three months of 2003 for the first time ever, the president said.
https://www.foxnews.com/story/bush-ties-policy-to-record-home-ownership

You are not going to win this debate.

Arguing that lack of regulations caused the great recession undermines your argument that it was caused by tax cuts.

The reality is it was the lack of regulation and other lack of enforcement that caused the recession and really had nothing to do with the tax cuts. The tax cuts just made it more expensive to try to fight the recession.
 
I think there are some positive qualities to conservatism. The problem is the Republican party and the far right media. They began their descent into hell decades ago. They decided that the ends justify the means and then began a campaign to dumb down, misinform, and radicalize their base. Well, mission accomplished. We now have tens of millions of unthinking, misinformed, batshit crazy robots who haven't had an independent thought in who knows how long. I had hoped that decent people would try to retake the Republican party and restore it, but they were shoved out of it or abandoned it.

like what? be specific?
 
Owning stocks is not the only wealth people can have. I know people that own no stock but their real estate holdings make them a multimillionaire. For most people their largest source of wealth is owning their home.

Right, but in the context of what we're discussing, specifically around the wealth of rich people, it is important.


The thing you don't seem to understand about wealth is it often isn't cash. It is based on an assumption of how much cash items could be sold for based on market conditions. That doesn't make it cash. It makes it paper wealth that can change dramatically if stock markets or real estate markets crash or explode. That is why billionaires in the US lost billions of dollars in Feb/March and then gained billions of dollars back by Oct/November. It isn't because they took all this money out of the system. It is simply because the supply/demand for what they are holding decreased/increased. Jeff Bezos didn't see a $48 billion wealth increase because Amazon sold that much stuff. His shares were suddenly valued at that because some other schmuck was willing to pay $3500 for a share of Amazon rather than $2500. There is no way Bezos could sell all his shares for $3500 because there aren't enough schmucks willing to pay that but because the artifact of how we value stock that is what wealth we declare Bezos has.

Right, but here's the thing...they're not acquiring that property with other property...they're using cash to buy it. And that cash comes from somewhere (the tax cut). So by transferring their wealth into things like real estate, they are REALLY pulling their money out of the economy because they're largely buying and selling these properties to each other.

A rich person buying a $10M home isn't going to do much for the economy, if that home is already constructed and furnished, which most of them are at that level.
 
Arguing that lack of regulations caused the great recession undermines your argument that it was caused by tax cuts.

How so?

The lack of regulations was to juice a housing market to make it look like the tax cuts were growing the economy when it was really debt that was growing the economy. And it was debt because...as always...household debt increases every time taxes are cut.


The reality is it was the lack of regulation and other lack of enforcement that caused the recession and really had nothing to do with the tax cuts.

The tax cuts were the impetus for the housing bubble. Had the tax cuts actually delivered on their promises in 2001 and 2002, there wouldn't have been a need to juice the housing market.

The poor performance of the economy following the tax cut is why Bush chose to goose the housing market beginning with his actions in late 2002.

I mean, the guy even campaigned on the idea that the "strong housing market" in 2004 was due to his tax cuts. Like, he literally said that. So Bush literally told you that the housing market was a result of his successful tax cut policy. So I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth...I'm quoting them directly.

Bush Ties Policy to Record Home Ownership
Touting his tax cuts as the economy's savior — and pointing to the strong housing market as proof — Bush said "more people own their own home now than ever." More than 50 percent of minorities owned their own homes in the last three months of 2003 for the first time ever, the president said.
https://www.foxnews.com/story/bush-ties-policy-to-record-home-ownership
 
Here's the problem with this argument: it's a distraction. We have never, ever, ever reached a point in this country, even when the top tax rate was 94%, that high taxation harms growth. In fact, there isn't a single real example of that happening anywhere, even outside the US.

It has never, ever happened. Ever. So concerning yourself with something that has never happened before, and will never happen, is a nice and easy way to avoid the discussion of what needs to be done. We could increase the top tax rate to 99.9999%, and we still wouldn't see any impact on economic growth. That's because once you reach a certain income level, you no longer have the capacity to spend more. You've bought everything you can. You've consumed everything you can. So any excess of that is just sitting outside the economy, not doing anything.

The 94% tax rate was only for 1944, 1945. The highest rate after WW2 was 92%

Even when the tax rates were 94%, which you should actually look at the tax tables and the IRS instructions for those years to see how that 94% was applied, federal revenues from taxes never exceeded 20% of GDP.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

In 1944 and 1945 all interest earned on government bonds was tax exempt. This has pretty much always been the case in the US. There are ways to make money and pay zero income tax. It has always come down to how to avoid taxes. This is why tax law can be used to dictate social policy.

The excess is not always sitting outside the economy. It is often invested in ways to that could in fact help the economy. Try looking up angel investing sometime.
 
The 94% tax rate was only for 1944, 1945. The highest rate after WW2 was 92%

And were there rich people when the tax rate was that high?


Even when the tax rates were 94%, which you should actually look at the tax tables and the IRS instructions for those years to see how that 94% was applied, federal revenues from taxes never exceeded 20% of GDP.

So what? And again, 1-2% of GDP can mean hundreds of billions of dollars.


In 1944 and 1945 all interest earned on government bonds was tax exempt. This has pretty much always been the case in the US. There are ways to make money and pay zero income tax. It has always come down to how to avoid taxes. This is why tax law can be used to dictate social policy.

Ah, so now we're getting to the meat of this...that there is no sound fiscal policy with regard to tax cuts...it's purely a social one, like I said earlier.

In the case of tax cuts specifically, they are 100% a social policy, not a fiscal one, as Lee Atwater put so clearly for anyone who is still doubting the sincerity of the policy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*gger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*gger, n*gger.”

So there is no economic argument to be made in favor of tax cuts...there are only arguments to make against them. Tax cuts are racist Conservative policy that has hoodwinked people into thinking there's some economic rationale behind it. There isn't.

Tax cuts are destructive policy, full stop.
 
The crazy thing is, poor whites are hurt just as much by tax cuts as are poor blacks. But any poor white who can be told to look down on someone else will do so gladly, hence poor Republicans (like 99% of the republicans on this forum).

Poor white people should be 100% on board with reparations, because they'll benefit the most.
 
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