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OMOLIVES , Don't think you will have major problems with -- FACT CHECK: How Does Paul Ryan's Case For Tax Cuts Match The Facts?
December 2, 20177:00 AM ET
[...]
"We wanted a middle-class tax cut. We wanted to have a system that's more fair, much simpler."

There is no reason to doubt that this was one of Ryan's goals. Helping the middle class is the lodestar for politicians in both parties. Ryan rarely misses a chance to note his roots in blue-collar Janesville, Wis., and the bill does reduce tax rates for the middle class.

However, Ryan was working with President Trump, who wanted a tax cut for corporations. Ryan said the bill was "designed" as a middle-class tax cut, but the core of the resulting bill is really the corporate tax cut. Republicans also were determined to lower tax rates for the wealthiest individuals and abolish the estate tax, paid only by individuals who leave more than $5.49 million to their heirs.

Because congressional rules limit the overall size of the tax cut, tax relief for businesses and the wealthy leaves fewer savings to spread around to everyone else.

"The average tax cut for a middle-class family is going to be $1,182."

The key word is "average." Some middle-class families will indeed see a tax cut. Others in the very same income brackets will not. Why the difference? It's because of how the House went about that goal of making the tax code "much simpler."

The bill increases the standard deduction for taxpayers who do not itemize deductions. That amounts to a tax cut for them. But the bill also eliminates deductions taken by many who itemize. Those people may face higher tax bills.

For example, NPR recently reported on the effect of eliminating a tax deduction for medical expenses. In our interview, Ryan downplayed the effects of this change.

"[The person claiming it] is typically a higher-income person. ... You have to make a pretty
good amount of money before you can even enjoy the ability to use that tax deduction."

NPR health policy correspondent Alison Kodjak has reported otherwise. In a Nov. 17 report, Kodjak noted that the deduction — which can only be claimed when medical expenses not covered by insurance exceed 10 percent of your income — is commonly used by many parents of disabled children and the elderly on fixed incomes.

https://www.npr.org/2017/12/02/567882076/fact-check-how-does-paul-ryans-case-for-tax-cuts-match-the-facts

Two 2017 posts:

As GOP hands them billions, Wells Fargo CEO admits he won’t help workers
[...]In a presentation to investors, Sloan was asked what the company plans to do with the GOP-engineered windfall. He answered, “Is it our goal to increase return to our shareholders and do we have an excess amount of capital? The answer to both is, yes. So our expectation should be that we will continue to increase our dividend and our share buybacks next year and the year after that and the year after that.”
P - That means the wealthiest people who own part of Wells Fargo, including Sloan, will get the spoils.
P - Meanwhile, Wells Fargo is laying off employees in Charlotte, North Carolina, and at a call center in Pennsylvania.
P - Despite being handed out billions by the Republican Party, their priorities are clearly to reward those who are already well-off — who even profited from the scandal — and not in hiring people in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
P - Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by 0.72 percent in Pennsylvania and 3.66 percent in North Carolina, and this is how the states and their workers are being treated in response.
P - The Republican tax bill is another in a long line of tax scams, where the only thing that trickles down on to average Americans is more empty promises and deception.
sortagreen -- https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=137150624

The Most Important Reasons To Never Vote Republican Again
December 18, 2017
The Republican trickle down on you theory.
P - Republicans have surrendered their status as a political party in lieu of being a tribal cult. Nothing illustrates this more than the economic dogma that if you give rich people more money, they will spend it on jets and yachts which poor people will build. Despite ALL evidence to the contrary, Republicans refuse to embrace logic or even facts in this regard. It was the great Will Rogers who wrote,
P - “They didn’t start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour. The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot. But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellows hands. They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue.”
P - Republicans have no other economic policy than to cut taxes and cut anything which helps poor people. They will lie, cheat and steal everything they possible can to make this happen. They are looting the US Treasury now with their tax scam. Every single time Republicans have gotten power and passed a tax cut, it has crippled our economy. Republicans will predictably respond that when Reagan cut taxes, we had an improved economy. What they fail to mention if they even know is that Reagan also moved $1.4 trillion of Social Security into the general fund. Congress never put the money back either. When Democrats try to clean up the mess, Republicans blame Democrats for not cleaning it up fast enough. FDR, Clinton and Obama all did remarkably well to get the economy going after disastrous Republican policies crippled our nation.
P - Every Republican swears an oath to Grover Norquist who serves the Koch brothers that they will never increase taxes under any circumstances. The last Republican to do so was George H.W. Bush and he was promptly defeated with a lot of help from Norquist who wants our government to be so small he can, “strangle it in a bathtub.” Republicans have adopted this philosophy with a religious zeal that can only be described as cultish. This is why they send these insurgents like Mike Lee and Ted Cruz to do anything they possibly can to make our government weaker.
P - While Republicans were busy carving out a tax-give-away to their donor class, they allowed the CHIP program to lapse. If you were not sure of the complete and utter evil of Republicans, look at what Senator Orrin Hatch had to say.
P - But we — the reason CHIP is having trouble is because we don’t have money anymore. We just add more and more spending and more and more spending, and you can look at the rest of the bill for the more and more spending. I happen to think CHIP has done a terrific job for for people who really needed the help. I have taken the position around here my whole Senate service. I believe in helping those who cannot help themselves but would if they could. I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything.
P - We have $1.5 trillion to hand out to the Republican donor class but we don’t have enough for poor children. Got that?
P - There has not been an immigration reform bill to the House floor because John Boehner and Paul Ryan refused to allow it. Instead, Trump has canceled DACA which puts 800,000 undocumented immigrants who only know this country in danger of being deported. We currently have a negative population growth because millennials are so crippled with debt that they can’t afford to have children. We need a constant stream of immigrants coming to the US for many reasons but most of all, we have to keep a tax paying base if we are going to take care of the aging baby boomers who have put us on this road to perdition. Republicans have determined that immigrants are not good for our country, especially if they are brown.
P - All Republicans are servile to the National Rifle Association. The deaths of 20 toddlers in Newtown were not enough to inspire Republicans to do anything about restraining access to weapons of mass death. When 58 dead and over 500 were shot in Las Vegas, again, Republicans refuse to do anything to stop the flow of blood in America despite the fact that more than 80% of Americans want something done. Republicans will not even outlaw the bump stocks which turn a semi-auto rifle into a fully automatic assault weapon. Republicans also repealed restrictions which prevented people on the “no-fly list” and people diagnosed as insane from purchasing weapons of mass death. Now they are trying to pass a provision to make silencers legal.
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Two 2018:

The Trump Tax Scam, Phase II

Deficits are up? Cut Medicare and Social Security!

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

Oct. 18, 2018

When the Trump tax cut was on the verge of being enacted, I called it “the biggest tax scam in history,” and made a prediction: deficits would soar, and when they did, Republicans would once again pretend to care about debt and demand cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Sure enough, the deficit is soaring. And this week Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, after declaring the surge in red ink “very disturbing,” called for, you guessed it, cuts in “Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.” He also suggested that Republicans might repeal the Affordable Care Act — taking away health care from tens of millions — if they do well in the midterm elections.

Any political analyst who didn’t see this coming should find a different profession. After all, “starve the beast” — cut taxes on the rich, then use the resulting deficits as an excuse to hack away at the safety net — has been G.O.P. strategy for decades.

Oh, and anyone asking why Republicans believed claims that the tax cut would pay for itself is being naïve. Whatever they may have said, they never actually believed that the tax cut would be deficit-neutral; they pushed for a tax cut because it was what wealthy donors wanted, and because their posturing as deficit hawks was always fraudulent. They didn’t really buy into economic nonsense; it would be more accurate to say that economic nonsense bought them.

That said, even I have been surprised by a couple of things about the G.O.P.’s budget bait-and-switch. One is the timing: I would have expected McConnell to hold his tongue until after the midterms. The other is the lying: I knew Donald Trump and his allies would be dishonest, but I didn’t expect the lies to be as baldfaced as they are.

What are they lying about? For starters, about the causes of a sharply higher deficit, which they claim is the result of higher spending, not lost revenue. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, even tried to claim that the deficit is up because of the costs of hurricane relief.

The flimsy justification for such claims is that in dollar terms, federal revenue over the past year is slightly up from the previous year, while spending is about 3 percent higher.

But that’s a junk argument, and everyone knows it. Both revenue and spending normally grow every year thanks to inflation, population growth and other factors. Revenue during Barack Obama’s second term grew more than 7 percent a year. The sources of the deficit surge are measured by how much we’ve deviated from that normal growth, and the answer is that it’s all about the tax cut.

Dishonesty about the sources of the deficit is, however, more or less a standard Republican tactic. What’s new is the double talk that pervades G.O.P. positioning on the budget and, to be fair, just about every major policy issue.

What do I mean by double talk? Well, consider the fact that even as McConnell blames “entitlements” (that is, Medicare and Social Security) for deficits, and declares (falsely) that Medicare in particular is “unsustainable,” Paul Ryan’s super PAC has been running ads accusing Democrats of wanting to cut Medicare. The cynicism is breathtaking.

But then, it’s no more cynical than the behavior of Republicans like Dean Heller, Josh Hawley and even Ted Cruz who voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which protects Americans with pre-existing medical conditions, or supported a lawsuit trying to strip that protection out of the act, and are now running on the claim that they want to … protect people with pre-existing conditions.

The point is that we’re now in a political campaign where one side’s claimed position on every major policy issue is the opposite of its true position. Republicans have concluded that they can’t win an argument on the issues, but rather than changing their policies, they’re squirting out clouds of ink and hoping voters won’t figure out where they really stand.

Why do they think they can get away with this? The main answer is obviously contempt for their own supporters, many of whom get their news from Fox and other propaganda outlets that slavishly follow the party line. And even in appeals to those supporters who rely on other sources, Republicans believe that they can neutralize the deep unpopularity of their actual policies by misrepresenting their positions, and win by playing to racism and fear.

But let’s be clear: G.O.P. cynicism also involves a lot of contempt for the mainstream news media. Historically, media organizations have been remarkably unwilling to call out lies; the urge to play it safe with he-said-she-said reporting has very much worked to Republicans’ advantage, given the reality that the modern G.O.P. lies a lot more than Democrats do. Even the most blatant falsehood tends to be reported with headlines about how “Democrats say” it’s false, not that it’s actually false.

Anyway, at this point Republicans are proclaiming that war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength and the party that keeps trying to kill Medicare is actually the program’s greatest defender.

Can a campaign this dishonest actually win? We’ll find out in less than three weeks.

BullNBear52 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=144358529

Taxpayers, You’ve Been Scammed

"What's Behind President Donald Trump's Latest Poll Numbers? | Morning Joe | MSNBC
[...]
The still more-Obama economy ticking ok, yet Trump's changes are starting to bite, and inflation is overriding the middle class tax cuts. Trump's tariffs starting to hit with farmer uncertainty building, and Harley Davidson (Wisc.) jobs a problem. Trump tweet attacking HD a pain-in-the-azz for Republican candidates there. . Suburbia has problems with Trump. His con is unraveling. Healthcare premiums possibly up 30-50% in late Sept./early Oct. Trump's administration seen as irresponsible on the fiscal front, corrupt and cruel in the social arena. Even with Obama's (still more than not) ticking along Trump hits 39% in latest Gallop. Not good historically. Suburbia drifting from Donald. No Hillary to bully and lie about. Who could be slipped into a jail him/her chant ever again. It was boring as hell anyway. What scurrilous, nasty, irresponsible action(s) will Donald and his corrupt administration come up with before the mid-terms?"

By Paul Krugman
March 1, 2018
[...]
Yet even before the tax cut, federal tax receipts were looking weak .. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S .. for an economy with low unemployment and a rising stock market — for example, far lower as a percentage of G.D.P. than the tax take during the Clinton boom of the 1990s, and even a bit lower than they were at the end of the Bush-era expansion. The tax cut will push them lower still. Something will have to give.

And we already know what will give, if Republicans get their way: programs that benefit working Americans. In fact, the usual suspects like Paul Ryan were talking about the need for “entitlement reform .. http://thehill.com/homenews/house/363642-ryan-pledges-entitlement-reform-in-2018 ” — meaning cuts in Medicare and Medicaid — to reduce deficits even as they were passing a huge tax cut that will make those deficits much worse.

Hence my analogy about the guy who “gives” you a hamburger, then bills it to your credit card. Ryan celebrated the tax cut with a tweet about a teacher .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/02/03/paul-ryan-celebrated-the-tax-cut-with-a-tweet-about-a-secretary-saving-1-50-a-week/?utm_term=.28153c79a887 .. saving $1.50 a week on her taxes; that’s like saying you should feel grateful for a “gift” that’s actually being charged to your own credit card. How’s that $75-a-year saving going to look when the teacher finds out that, partly because of that tax cut, her mother’s Medicare plan has been converted into an inadequate voucher system and Medicaid won’t pay for her father’s nursing home care?

Meanwhile, about your companion’s steak dinner: Most of the tax cut actually consisted of huge tax breaks for corporations, which is in effect a big tax cut for stockholders. And while many Americans own a bit of stock via their retirement accounts, even if you include these indirect holdings, more than 80 percent of stocks .. http://www.nber.org/papers/w20733.pdf .. are owned by the wealthiest 10 percent of the population. So on the face of it, the wealthy are giving themselves a big gift, and sending the bill to the middle class.
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