Well, Pence wasn’t doing so well as governor of Indiana. I think he’s smart enough to understand the value of making compromises, but he is a true believer when it comes to his far right political and social views, which may prevent him from accepting political realities even when he knows better.
Stranger
Oh, yeah, about those Trump’s superior skills…
[Nelson]
Ha! Ha!
[/Nelson]
I was under the impression that one of the main reasons that tax cuts for the wealthy (also known as “tax reform”) will be more difficult to achieve without dumping 26 million people off the federal health care roster (also known as “health care reform”) is that the second one was going to pay for the first one.
I know nothing about how political capital works, but this would be the ordinary kind of capital.
As regards tax, I recall Trump saying that he’s basically memorized all of the tax statutes, and given the extents to which I’ve seen that some businessmen have gone to avoid paying taxes, I think it’s possible that he might be telling the truth on this one.
Assuming that to be the case, it means that he’ll have the one advantage in a tax fight that he didn’t with health care. He’ll actually know what he’s talking about.
But if he goes for getting it done within the 100 days, and doesn’t have the long-term stamina to keep pushing it, then it still might not happen.
Fundamentally, tax reform is very hard to pull off. There’s a sort of equilibrium that demands that it be more-or-less the way that it is.
Taxes generally come from income. If you tax wealth, you’re usually taxing retirement money, which makes no sense. Making sure that people are able to retire and survive is a government goal, so reducing the ability for individuals makes no sense for the government to do. So we’re left taxing income.
Now if you plot the number of people earning a particular income times the quantity of that income, you end up with a graph that’s small on either end (the poor and the rich) and fat in the middle. While the wealthy pull in a better salary than the non-wealthy, it’s not so much greater than them nor are there enough of them to really compete with the sheer quantity of upper-middle class earners.
If you write any tax legislation, it must pull money from the middle upper-class because this is where nearly all of the money which can be taken is to be found. If you add the wealthy into the mix, you will get more money in taxes, but not really a significantly greater amount.
But if you’re a politician, then you need big backers for your next campaign. Those big backers are the wealthy and they will want reduced taxes (on the argument that they’re creating most of the jobs which provide all of the other tax money they’re getting).
So, as a politcian, there’s no strong benefit for the practical day-to-day running of the government to taking money from the wealthy, and there is a personal, occupationally necessary element to not tax the wealthy.
But there’s also the strong idea that the more money you make, the more that you should be taxed. Anything else would be “unfair”. The people will actually elect you are going to require that taxes are “fair”.
On the other hand, there’s no advantage what-so-ever from taking any money at all from the poor. You’re just going to have to give it back to them. But it’s hard to know who is poor and who is working multiple jobs and generating a lot of money. So you need to get the end-of-year report to figure out who was actually poor all that time, when you see all the numbers tallied up over the full year.
If you take all of these constraints and run them through a hundred years of evolutionary force and you get to where we are today. There is a progressive tax scheme on income. But there are a number of deductibles that one can take out if you’ve got the money to hire a tax consultant to help you figure out how to apply them and reduce your tax load. The end-result being that the poor are taxed, but get a refund once a year. The middle-class takes a huge hit, to give the government money to spend on the poor. And the wealthy hire tax consultants and use various loopholes to avoid paying anything.
This is the logical result of reality. Resisting reality is, in our system that has become accustomed to it, is a very difficult thing to do.
The extents to which businessmen have gone to avoid paying taxes are always invariably to hire the best accounts possible to do their taxes for them. There is virtually zero chance Trump has ever done his own taxes in his entire life, and almost zero that he knows anything at all about the tax code.
Stranger…ok.
So you know that the Marine Corps, in order to be “self contained”, has it’s own air force (larger than that of most nations), armed ships, infantry, armor, artillery…all of it.
It’s well known and accepted throughout the corporate world that if you merge 2 companies that do the same thing, it is possible to provide the same service (whatever it is the 2 organizations do) for their customers for less money because you remove redundant people. By firing them, and in some cases this creates a monopoly or the combined company is not very friendly to it’s customers, but this is a well accepted idea.
So if you want to save money but have the same amount of aircraft and ships and soldiers to threaten other nations with, removing the Marine corps is a low hanging fruit. They exist because of lobbying.
As for the midcourse defense interceptors, well, 40 billion over 10 years isn’t much. And stopping even 1 incoming ballistic missile, if the system managed to do that by unloading all interceptors, could save a million lives. ABM defense has the potential to directly save a vast amount of lives or property when it matters. Another Marine Corp division doesn’t save any lives directly…
Oh, and here’s a Times article explaining why the Marine’s strategic niche - of great importance historically - is no longer a wise strategy. USMC: Under-utilized Superfluous Military Capability | TIME.com
The link between the AHCA and tax cuts is mostly political. If you cut taxes without getting the deficit reductions from the AHCA, your overall deficit increases look bad and you lose the support of any hardcore deficit hawks. If you get both the AHCA deficit reduction and tax cuts passed, the optics are less bad.
A reconciliation bill is allowed to increase the deficit for up to 10 years; the 10-year limit comes from the Byrd Rule. For a time, reconciliation couldn’t be used to take actions that increased the deficit, but that restriction was rolled back in 2011. This is why, for example, the Bush Tax Cuts passed under reconciliation could increase the deficit but had to have a sunset provision (and why Congress had to have a big debate in 2010 as to whether or not to make the tax cuts permanent).
I suspect it is more what they wish than anything else.
What comes to mind is that those who supported trump care, trump distanced and disowned it, and left the politicians take the fall. So less will be willing to support Trump’s ideas if they know Trump will throw them under the bus.
Trump has liked to isolate himself getting rid of those who oppose his ideas and surround himself with those who support him. In politics that becomes a very problematic strategy that few are willing to sign on to as it breaks needed alliances needed to be effective and in many countries has required assassinations and taking of political prisoners of the state to accomplish, something hopefully we are far from.
So let’s stop right here; he’'s lying, obviously.
I can believe Trump has some familiarity with tax law that his specific to his sort of business. But that’'s ten percent of tax law at most.
I thought the main issue was that eliminating Obamacare would have lowered federal expenditures on health care. Since that didn’t go through, coming up with a revenue-neutral plan that lowers taxes is going to be more difficult.
Please tell me you’re joking. No businessman, no matter how important minimizing taxes is to his business has “memorized the tax code.” Not even a tax lawyer, whose job it is to advise a business on minimizing taxes would make such a claim.
Not only is it stupid to believe him when he says that, it’s one of the stupidest lies to tell. It shows you that Trump has absolutely no control over what comes out of his mouth.
Congressional Republicans are looking at a President who is going to be dogged a bit by investigations regarding Russian election hacking collusion, who has fumbled badly on his attempted Muslim ban, and who has now cut bait and run on the GOP signature promise and his “day one” promise. He promised a whole heck of a lot that “believe me, will be great” and has now shown all but his most diehard supporters that there as no great plan being kept secret. This is president with no honeymoon period.
There was a promise made to punish those in the GOP who did not support him on this bill but those who did are the ones who will now have some explaining to do in their home districts. He has no ability to punish any of those who failed to stay behind him.
The GOP consists of different elements who disagree and several of which are very used to saying “our way or we let the whole building burn down” and others who are tired of caving in to those ones. With the Democrats staying united the GOP can’t get much done if they don’t stay united and a budget cannot be everything to all GOP interests.
Accomplishing anything moving forward will require great dealmaking skills, which Trump has now demonstrated to all he does not possess. Threats can work when it is clear that you have the power to follow through; Trump is now shown to Congressional Republicans not only to be a paper tiger but the paper is used from the toilet bowl.
I agree. It shows that not only has Trump not memorized the tax code but he probably hasn’t even seen it. Somebody familiar with the tax code would know how implausible this claim is.
There may be agreement on many issues but the question is who’s leading. Is Trump leading Congress or is Congress leading Trump? It doesn’t make much of a difference when they’re heading in the same direction. But when they differ on an issue, it will determine what happens.
With all due respect, you have no idea what you are talking about. The basic utility of the Marine Corps–their essentially self-contained logistics–allows the Marines to be on station in an emerging conflict in a fraction of the time it takes for the lumbering Army to get moving or the Air Force Air Mobility Command to mass reschedule transport flights. The old saw is that “The Army does nothing fast, the Navy does nothing right, and the Air Force does nothing for anyone else;” while not strictly true (and apologies to soldiers, sailors, and airmen who work hard to meet objectives) the essential point is that these are giant bureaucracies with their own internal politics and interservice rivalries which are not fundamentally constructed for rapid pivots, and are often dependant to calling upon Reserve and National Guard units to support major operations, and are also heavily invested in objectives other than warfighting, such as research and development, construction, education, et cetera. The Marine Corps is a dedicated fighting force with just enough support aspects to keep Marines moving, armed, and fed. In any case, the Marine Corp budget comprises about 4% of the overall Department of Defense budget, whereas the other services are 25%-40% of the budget. Zeroing out the entire Marine Corps is practically a rounding error in terms of substantially reducing military expenditures.
Sure, it would be…if it worked. As it stands, major and vital components of the GMD system have yet to be fully fielded or even tested, and after criticism of early development failures (which should be expected when advancing the state of the art in novel ways) the tests have been heavily orchestrated with an eye to assuring a successful result rather than testing to the corners of the capability box, with the result that nobody who has taken a critical look at the system has any confidence whatsoever that it could reliably prevent a real world attack from a capable nation. The only component of the system that has actually worked consistently is the booster vehicle, and that was actually alternative design (literally designated “Alternative Boost Vehicle” during development) based on existing commercial solid propellant motors and thrust vector systems. And US$40B is just the deployment costs for GMD production; overall expenditures in ballistic missile defense in the modern era from 1980 onward) are around US$150B; more than the entire Gemini and Apollo space programs cost, to achieve no credible defense capability against ICBM-class threats. Want to cut defense spending? Start with massive expenditures on questionable capabilities benefiting no one but particularly influential Congressional districts, and stop engaging in military adventurism for the sake of ineffectual nation-building.
Stranger