Re “Tax Wrangling Aims to Sweeten Gains of Wealthy” (front page, Nov. 28):
Setting aside the procedural and policy arguments against ramming a strictly partisan tax bill through Congress only a month after the first draft was introduced in the House, many Americans are still left wondering how the latest bill would affect their own bottom lines.
On Nov. 2, the G.O.P. promised an “online tax calculator” that Representative Chris Collins trumpeted would allow people to “take their numbers from last year and plug them in and see what their new taxes will be.” He assured us that “middle-income people whether they’re in New York or Alabama are going to save money.”
With a vote in the full Senate looming as soon as this week, no such calculator has surfaced. A skeptic might think that this is because middle-class Americans might not be quite so pleased with the way they fare after all.
ADAM B. GOTTLIEB, WASHINGTON
To the Editor:
Re “Religious Right Stands to Gain in Tax Debate” (front page, Nov. 27): Let the horse trading continue! No hearings on this reverse Robin Hood tax bill, but Republican leaders can openly bribe members of Congress for their votes. For example, getting rid of the Johnson Amendment prohibiting places of worship from advocating politically.
Churches are not required to pay taxes. In fact, by their not paying taxes to the communities and country they inhabit, you and I support them as we pick up their share. I don’t want them electioneering on my dime — separation of church and state, you know. If they want to take a stand on candidates and claim their right to free speech, let them pay taxes.
DEE BAER, WILMINGTON, DEL.
To the Editor:
“Will a Tax Cut Raise Wages? Some Doubt It” (front page, Nov. 24) clearly shows that despite Republican forecasts, the tax bill is being met with a lack of enthusiasm across the board, including from corporations. Will they gladly accept a lower tax rate? Yes, but when asked by Gary D. Cohn, President Trump’s top economic adviser, if they would increase wages and hiring, to his surprise few corporate heads indicated they would.
Tying tax relief to a formula that includes investing in plant and equipment, increased hiring and higher wages benefits the economy and gives the public a reason to support the plan.
This plan doesn’t do any of this, and history has shown that with more money, corporations will do little for their employees and more for shareholders.
A further condition should be that if corporations accept a tax cut, they should not be allowed to buy back their stock.
FRANK GUNSBERG ENGLEWOOD, N.J.
To the Editor:
Your Nov. 26 editorial about the unrealistic Republican statements promising the moon from the proposed tax bill (“The Republican Tax on the Future”) prompts the question: Why hasn’t one public hearing been held by the House or the Senate before considering the most significant change to our tax code in 31 years?
The public does not really have a clue as to what changes are in store. We are being told of all the increased benefits and tax reductions coming our way, but this bill has been conjured up in the darkness of congressional meetings without observers, instead of in the light of day, with openness and transparency.
The rush to passage in order to give President Trump his Christmas present and bragging rights of having finally achieved something significant in his first year in office is nothing short of a disgrace and a slap in the face to a gullible public.
HARVEY GLASSMAN BOYNTON BEACH, FLA.
To the Editor:
Re “This Tax Bill Is Now a Health Care Bill” (nytimes.com, Nov. 15):
David Leonhardt states that removing the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act will cause premiums to increase because we need healthy people to help pay the bills of sicker people. Since healthy people will eventually get sick, removing the mandate creates a far more important problem.
As long as insurance companies are required to cover people with pre-existing conditions at the same rates as their neighbors, it is both morally reprehensible and fiscally irresponsible to allow people to buy health insurance after they become sick. You cannot wait until your house burns down to buy fire insurance coverage, and you cannot wait until you have an accident to get auto insurance. Why should this be allowed for health insurance?
VICTOR ROBERTS, BURNT HILLS, N.Y.
To the Editor:
“Tax Code’s ‘Thank You’ to Teachers Puts House and Senate at Odds” (news article, Nov. 27):
Labeling a tax credit for school supplies a “perk” uses Orwellian doublespeak to discredit teachers and unfairly compare their tax credit to those of other groups. The teachers are spending a significant portion of their salaries to buy school supplies that directly benefit students, not the teachers themselves.
This is not similar to other professionals who deduct office, automobile or other expenses to benefit their businesses. We are taking a situation that is already unfair — expecting teachers to purchase supplies for their students — and making it even less so.
BullNBear52:"And the question is whether there are enough And the question is whether there are enough Republican senators with principles, who believe that policies should not be sold with lies, to stop this bum’s rush."
If anyone try's to tell there is a "Republican senators with principles," They are lying there ass off!!!!
The G.O.P.’s only legislative achievement has been a big disappointment.
By Paul Krugman Opinion Columnist
Nov. 15, 2018
President Trump talking about tax cuts in April at an event in Florida.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
Last week’s blue wave means that Donald Trump will go into the 2020 election with only one major legislative achievement: a big tax cut for corporations and the wealthy. Still, that tax cut was supposed to accomplish big things. Republicans thought it would give them a big electoral boost, and they predicted dramatic economic gains. What they got instead, however, was a big fizzle.
The political payoff, of course, never arrived. And the economic results have been disappointing. True, we’ve had two quarters of fairly fast economic growth, but such growth spurts are fairly common — there was a substantially bigger spurt .. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A191RL1Q225SBEA#0 .. in 2014, and hardly anyone noticed. And this growth was driven largely by consumer spending .. https://www.bea.gov/news/2018/gross-domestic-product-3rd-quarter-2018-advance-estimate .. and, surprise, government spending, which wasn’t what the tax cutters promised.
But why have the tax cut’s impacts been so minimal? Leave aside the glitch-filled .. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/24/tax-law-glitches-gop-423434 .. changes in individual taxes, which will keep accountants busy for years; the core of the bill was a huge cut in corporate taxes. Why hasn’t this done more to increase investment?
The answer, I’d argue, is that business decisions are a lot less sensitive to financial incentives — including tax rates — than conservatives claim. And appreciating that reality doesn’t just undermine the case for the Trump tax cut. It undermines Republican economic doctrine as a whole.
About business decisions: It’s a dirty little secret of monetary analysis that changes in interest rates affect the economy mainly through their effect on the housing market and the international value of the dollar (which in turn affects the competitiveness of U.S. goods on world markets).Any direct effect on business investment is so small that it’s hard even to see it in the data. What drives such investment is, instead, perceptions about market demand.
Why is this the case? One main reason is that business investments have relatively short working lives. If you’re considering whether to take out a mortgage to buy a house that will stand for many decades, the interest rate matters a lot. But if you’re thinking about taking out a loan to buy, say, a work computer that will either break down or become obsolescent in a few years, the interest rate on the loan will be a minor consideration in deciding whether to make the purchase.
And the same logic applies to tax rates: There aren’t many potential business investments that will be worth doing with a 21 percent profits tax, the current rate, but weren’t worth doing at 35 percent, the rate before the Trump tax cut.
Also, a substantial fraction of corporate profits really represents rewards to monopoly power, not returns on investment — and cutting taxes on monopoly profits is a pure giveaway, offering no reason to invest or hire.
Now, proponents of the tax cut, including Trump’s own economists .. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/documents/Tax%20Reform%20and%20Wages.pdf , made a big deal about how we now have a global capital market, in which money flows to wherever it gets the highest after-tax return. And they pointed to countries with low corporate taxes, like Ireland, which appear to attract lots of foreign investment.
The key word here is, however, “appear.” Corporations do have a strong incentive to cook their books — I’m sorry, manage their internal pricing — in such a way that reported profits pop up in low-tax jurisdictions, and this in turn leads on paper to large overseas investments.
But there’s much less to these investments than meets the eye. For example, the vast sums corporations have supposedly invested in Ireland have yielded remarkably few jobs and remarkably little income .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/opinion/tax-cuts-and-leprechauns-wonkish.html?module=inline .. for the Irish themselves — because most of that huge investment in Ireland is nothing more than an accounting fiction.
So the basic result of lower taxes on corporations is that corporations pay less in taxes — full stop. Which brings me to the problem with conservative economic doctrine.
That doctrine is all about the supposed need to give the already privileged incentives to do nice things for the rest of us. We must, the right says, cut taxes on the wealthy to induce them to work hard, and cut taxes on corporations to induce them to invest in America.
But this doctrine keeps failing in practice. President George W. Bush’s tax cuts didn’t produce a boom; President Barack Obama’s tax hike didn’t cause a depression. Tax cuts in Kansas didn’t jump-start the state’s economy; tax hikes in California didn’t slow growth.
And with the Trump tax cut, the doctrine has failed again. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to get politicians to understand something when their campaign contributions depend on their not understanding it.
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