Trump Tax Cut Proposal Underway

[Tero]

Corporate rax gift likely to have ”trugger” limits:
GOP Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said Tuesday he didn’t like the revenue trigger either, but if it’s needed to get to 50 votes in the Senate, then he also wants it to apply two ways -- bringing additional cuts if there’s robust growth. Cruz said his staff is working on writing such a provision.

[Brian Peacock]

In other words, "The richer we get the less we pay."

[Animavore]

No, Tax Cuts Really, Really, Really Didn’t Create Growth in Kansas

When It Comes to Kansas’s Trickle-Down Failure, Who Are You Going to Believe: Reality, or Sam Brownback?

The tweet you are about to read represents the closest I’ve ever come to doing a literal spit take. I had just sipped from my nice, hot cup of coffee and then this remarkable quote flowed through my Twitter stream:

I’ve already posted once today about the abysmal tax plan that Republicans are trying to pass in the Senate this week, but this quote from Republican Kansas Governor Sam Brownback demands another. That the GOP brought Brownback down to the Capitol in order to cheerlead for the Ryan/Trump tax cuts is more than just hubris—it’s downright delusional.

Some background: in 2011, after being elected governor of Kansas, Brownback decided to embark on the greatest trickle-down experiment in the history of America. He decided to use every man, woman, and child in Kansas as lab rats in a scheme that shifted wealth to the richest Kansans in the form of huge tax cuts.

I’m aware that this sounds like I’m misquoting Brownback, or playing roughshod with the record, but that’s not the case. He announced the experiment, using exactly that language, in an interview on Morning Joe in June of 2012:
“On taxes, you need to get your overall rates down, and you need to get your social manipulation out of it, in my estimation, to create growth. We’ll see how it works. We’ll have a real live experiment.”

With the help of a Republican supermajority in the Kansas state legislature, Brownback then set out to create the conservative paradise of his dreams. He hacked regulations down to the nub, slashed and eliminated taxes, and kept the minimum wage as low as he possibly could. In other words, Brownback did everything he could to create favorable conditions for the trickle down theory to play out in real life.

The story that Brownback used to sell those tax cuts to Kansans was simple: if you give more money to the top one percent, he argued, that wealth will then trickle down to you in the form of more jobs and higher wages. Brownback cut taxes and regulations at unprecedented levels. He argued that those cuts would result in economic growth for all Kansans. It’s a simple theory to understand, and the conclusion should be very easy to measure.

The experiment ended earlier this year, and the results were conclusive — Brownback’s theory was entirely wrong. Business did not grow. In fact, the top one percent simply took the money from the tax cuts and kept it. They didn’t re-invest in the state. That money didn’t flow back into the state’s coffers in the form of increased revenue and hiring. In fact, the state lost a ton of money, as Vox’s Alexia Fernández Campbell reported in June:

https://civicskunk.works/no-tax-cuts-re ... b35ec139a2

[Tero]

BS about Trump’s taxes
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/29/politics/ ... index.html

[Seabass]

All it needs is "some mathematical".

[JimC]

Being the kind of atheist who has a reasonable smattering of bible knowledge, I have a proposal: someone should build an ultra-fine mincing machine, feed the 1% into it, and pass what remains through the eye of a needle...

[Tero]

I think the tax bill will pass. The Republicans around here will be annoyed at losing deductions. But they are happier giving to the 1% than "Obamaphones to the poor."

Their congressman, mine, is clueless. He just reads prepared statements. By holding on to the only microphone he controls town hall meetings.

[Brian Peacock]

Of course the bill will pass. No republican wants to piss their donors off.

[Tero]

Ani, the Bronback act brought in a company town in Western Kansas that has a number of cattle slaughterhouses. The minimum wage jobs have workers come by and work a short while in a freezer.
Nobody does that job for long. Garden City google maps show huge ponds of animal waste from feed lots.

[Tero]

McCain as confused as rest about economic realities. But hey, let the Democrats fix it in 2020. He will be dead by then. Out with the old, in with the (non white old men) new.
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/ ... ill-270511

[Tero]

12:31 pmADD A COMMENT
Sen. Collins is now talking, and describing her amendment that would allow a deduction of up to $10,000 for property taxes.

The House’s bill would retain that deduction, but not the Senate’s.

Votes on this and other amendments will be later Thursday.

[JimC]

12:31 pmADD A COMMENT
Sen. Collins is now talking, and describing her amendment that would allow a deduction of up to $10,000 for property taxes.

The House’s bill would retain that deduction, but not the Senate’s.

Votes on this and other amendments will be later Thursday.

Your congress and your senate sometimes seem to operate as if they were 2 alternative governments...

With the Whitehouse, make that 3...

[Tero]

CNN
GOP leaders had previously hoped to vote the bill out of the chamber by Thursday, but during floor debate one key proposal hit a snag.
Since the beginning, Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican from Tennessee, has staked out ground that he would not vote for a tax bill that increased the deficit by a single penny.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin has been mush-mouthing for a while now about an analysis that was being done by the US Treasury Department which would show not only would the tax cuts for the rich and the corporations not result in an increased deficit, but would in fact lower the deficit. It was a lie.

'Trump’s Treasury Department is lying about its own analysis of the tax bill'

It doesn’t involve an inappropriate tweet or casual racism, but Alan Rappeport’s scoop [in The New York Times] about the Trump administration lying about its own internal analysis of the Republican tax plan deserves to go down as one of the most shocking stories of 2017. And the mild-mannered headline “Ahead of Vote, Promised Treasury Analysis of Tax Bill Proves Elusive” doesn’t come close to doing it justice.

Here’s the issue. For months now, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has been saying that his team will release a “dynamic” analysis of the Republican tax plan that will reveal its growth-boosting effects to be so incredible that they put deficit worries to rest. On September 28, he even said that his in-house analysis indicated the bill would reduce the deficit by $1 trillion rather than increase it.

That’s never seemed remotely plausible to me, but it’s clear that a lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill are counting on something in that neighborhood coming true to make the plan workable.

Rappeport reports that Mnuchin’s just been making it up:

Mr. Mnuchin has promised that Treasury will release its analysis in full. Yet, just one day before the full Senate prepares to vote on a sweeping tax rewrite, the administration has yet to produce the type of economic analysis that it is citing as a reason to pass the tax cut.

Those inside Treasury’s Office of Tax Policy, which Mr. Mnuchin has credited with running the models, say they have been largely shut out of the process and are not working on the type of detailed analysis that he has mentioned. An economist at the Office of Tax Analysis, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his job, said Treasury had not released a “dynamic” analysis showing that the tax plan would be paid for with economic growth because one did not exist

It’s of course difficult to prove things beyond any possible doubt in a field like economics. But common sense says that if there were any kind of remotely plausible way to generate an analysis that said this tax plan would pay for itself — or even come close to paying for itself — the Republican Party would find some way to produce the actual analysis. They haven’t produced such an analysis because there’s no way to generate one that’s remotely plausible.

The big tax cut for business owners and heirs to large fortunes will, in the long run, be paid for by people who are not business owners or heirs to large fortunes.

It may be paid for through the long-term middle-class tax increases that are laid out in the bill. Or it may be paid for through large cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs. Or it may be paid for through higher interest rates that raise the cost of new investment to deliver a tax windfall to old capital.

But there is a big tax cut coming for people who own businesses and for people who stand to inherit fortunes worth more than $11 million. And there will be a price for that.

The Trump administration and this Republican Congress appear to be astoundingly dishonest grifters. It's hard to even think of exceptions.

[Tero]

Republicans rewriting tax bill — and won’t vote tonight
Senate GOP leaders are still making major changes to the plan in order to win over several hold-outs.

By SEUNG MIN KIM and COLIN WILHELM
Politico
Updated 11/30/2017 07:56 PM EST

Senate Republicans are still scrambling to win over enough votes to pass their massive tax code overhaul, with major changes to the bill still up in the air and a final vote pushed beyond Thursday night.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the next vote in the tax debate will come at 11 a.m. Friday, as work continues behind the scenes to win over skeptical deficit hawks and other hold-outs.