Replies to post #275331 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Trump Sells Tax Plan With False Claims

"Senate GOP clears key hurdle on tax bill, moving closer to a final vote"

By LINDA QIUNOV. 29, 2017


President Trump, speaking about the tax overhaul in St. Charles, Mo., on Wednesday, offered rosy
projections of the effects of the plan. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — At a Wednesday afternoon rally in Missouri, President Trump played up what he called the “biggest tax cuts in history” and boasted about economic growth “in a nonbraggadocious way.”

“In fact, they’re going to say Trump is the opposite of an exaggerator,” he said of his rosy projections, in a speech full of exaggerations and falsehoods. Here’s an assessment.

He is wrong that “for years, they haven’t been able to get tax cuts, many, many years since Reagan.”

President Ronald Reagan, who enacted a major tax cut in 1981 and lowered tax rates again in 1986, was hardly the last president to have done so. President Bill Clinton signed the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997. President George W. Bush enacted two major tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. The stimulus passed under President Barack Obama included hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts, and Mr. Obama later extended the Bush tax cuts with the American Tax Payer Relief Act of 2012.

He inaccurately suggested the plan wouldn’t help the wealthy.

Mr. Trump insisted that the tax bill is “not good for me” or the wealthy. Referring to Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, the president said: “I keep hearing Schumer, ‘This is for the wealthy!’ If it is, my friends don’t know about it.”

That is not supported by most analyses of the tax plans being considered in Congress.

Under the Senate plan, every income level would receive a tax cut in 2019, but people earning $20,000 to $30,000 annually would face a tax increase the next year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation .. https://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=5040 . By 2027, most people making under $75,000 each year would see a tax increase, while those making more would continue to receive a tax cut.

Under the House plan, every income group would see tax cuts through 2027, but the richest one-fifth of Americans would receive 56 percent to almost 75 percent of the cuts, according to the Tax Policy Center .. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/distributional-analysis-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-passed-house-ways-and-means-committee/full .

Based on his 2005 tax return, Mr. Trump himself could save more than $1.1 billion .. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/28/us/politics/trump-tax-benefit.html .. under the White House tax framework, according to an analysis by The New York Times, and the same amount under the House plan, a tax expert at Marcum L.L.P. told NBC .. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/trump-his-family-could-save-more-1-billion-under-house-n821491 .

He falsely called the current plan the “biggest tax cut in the history of our country, bigger than Reagan.”

Mr. Trump has repeated this claim at least a dozen times since October, but it has not been true of any of the tax plans released in Congress or outlined by his administration.

[9 links before the comma in there]

A 2013 Treasury Department report .. https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/tax-analysis/Documents/WP81-Table2013.pdf .. assessed the size of major tax bills either as a percentage of the economy, by the reduction in federal revenue or in inflation-adjusted dollars. The 1981 Reagan tax cut is the largest under the first two metrics. It was equivalent to 2.9 percent of gross domestic product and reduced federal revenue by 13.3 percent. The 2012 Obama tax cut amounted to the largest cut in inflation-adjusted dollars: $321 billion a year.

For Mr. Trump’s tax cut to exceed the Reagan cuts as a share of G.D.P., the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates it would need to cost roughly $6.8 trillion over 10 years .. http://www.crfb.org/blogs/president-trumps-tax-cut-largest-history-yet . To have a larger effect on revenue, it would need to cost $5.7 trillion. No version of the current tax cut plan meets those benchmarks.

The budget blueprint .. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/us/politics/senate-budget-blueprint.html .. that Republicans released in mid-October, the bill passed in the House .. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/us/politics/house-tax-overhaul-bill.html .. in November and the bill currently being considered in the Senate .. https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/11.9.17%20JCT.pdf#page=6 .. all amount to a tax cut of about $1.5 trillion over 10 years. This would place as the 12th-largest as a share of the economy.

He falsely suggested that the stock market was previously flat.

Mr. Trump spoke of tepid growth before he took office. “In all fairness, the stock market was going this way,” he added, drawing a flat line with his hand. The stock market has hit record highs under Mr. Trump, but the uptick began after the financial .. http://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historical-chart .. crisis .. http://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-data .. in 2008.

The link he drew between market performance and G.D.P. growth also contradicts his own comments. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said the economy was “doing terribly” at 1.2 percent G.D.P. growth, which occurred in the first quarter of this year. But during that quarter, he jubilantly posted on Twitter about the stock market’s “longest winning streak in decades ..

Stock market hits new high with longest winning streak in decades. Great level of confidence and optimism - even before tax plan rollout!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 16, 2017

.”

He exaggerated when he said a 3.3 percent growth was the “largest increase in many years.”

The Commerce Department adjusted its estimate of G.D.P. growth to 3.3 percent in the third quarter of 2017 from a previous estimate of 3 percent. This is the largest increase in about three years, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis .. https://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?reqid=19&step=2#reqid=19&step=3&isuri=1&1910=x&0=-99&1921=survey&1903=1&1904=2008&1905=2017&1906=q&1911=0 . The economy grew at 3.2 percent in the first quarter of 2015 and at 5.2 percent in the third quarter of 2014, and the increase was larger than 3.3 percent in five other quarters under Mr. Obama.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/us/politics/fact-check-trump-tax-cuts.html

See also:

CBO Analysis Rewards GOP Senators With Conclusion That It's Meaner Than They Thought
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=136464204

THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON COLLEGE
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=136465170

Rushing a Tax Bill Through Congress
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=136498919

Brent Budowsky: Tax cut warning to GOP
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=136528540

The Biggest Tax Scam in History
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=136498865

Peg -- it's absolutely deliberate, self-consciously intended and done
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=136466891

"Senate GOP clears key hurdle on tax bill, moving closer to a final vote"

Late thought from - Trump veers past guardrails, feeling impervious to the uproar he causes

[...]

Trump traveled on Wednesday to Missouri, where he pitched the tax overhaul plan. He explained that he did not mind that the bill might
close loopholes for the wealthy like himself. He was talking about taxes, but he might as well been describing his overall mind-set.

“Hey, look, I’m president,” Trump said. “I don’t care. I don’t care anymore.”
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=136529978

Politics aside, it must hurt millions to have a lying scumbag as a president. It doesn't bode well without change.

[BOREALIS]

2400+ religious leaders sign letter condemning 'fundamentally unjust' Republican tax bill

By Hunter
Thursday Nov 30, 2017 · 12:32 PM CST

More than 2,400 religious leaders just sent the Senate a letter condemning the Republican "tax plan" that the party intends to shove through, raising taxes on millions, cutting key services like Medicare, and making other tax changes in order to provide a windfall to the very richest Americans.
https://networklobby.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/FaithLeaderLetterSenateTaxBill.pdf (90 pages)

We, the undersigned faith leaders representing the Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, Buddhist and other faith traditions and denominations across the country, express our strong opposition to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act adopted by the Senate Finance Committee. This bill violates our moral principles of equality, justice, and fairness.

We call on Congress to oppose the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act due to our strong belief that this bill is fiscally irresponsible, endangers our country’s economic health, and disproportionately benefits the wealthy at the expense of vulnerable people and low-income families. [...]

As people of faith, we view decisions about tax policy and the federal budget as moral decisions. Simply put, this proposed legislation is fundamentally unjust.

There was once a time when Republicans would mew endlessly about their supposed morality; they have largely stopped now, or at the least nobody is bothering to put those statements on camera anymore. Electing Donald Trump and standing by him despite a string of racist, sexist, crooked, and generally Constitution-punching things seems to have been the thing that finally shamed omnipresent Republican God-botherers into silence. At this point the "moral" crowd of far-right preachers and patriots is engaged in explaining why child molestation is a tolerable sin in exchange for certain tax cuts. You don't often hear Paul Ryan blustering over his supposed deep faith these days. Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. is a running joke of a man, and good evidence that the conservative religious movement has, as an entity with any identifiable moral backings at all, collapsed.

So it is not likely that the Senate Republicans receiving this letter from 2,400 of the nation's actual, practicing religious leaders will so much as give it a glance. The concept of a "moral principle" was something to be pretended at, come election-time; the battle they are currently waging has not a thing to do with America or Americans, but is a desperate exercise to convince a few dozen of the very wealthiest Americans that their future political careers are still worth funding. This is a battle for patronage, not morality. Morality was loaded into the trunk of Donald Trump's limousine and is currently buried somewhere on the grounds of his Florida golf course.

This is just a grift. You can call your own senator and let them know that you know that, and that you will never forgive or forget a vote to turn Americans away from their medical treatments or for raising your own taxes so that Ivanka and Donald Jr. do not have to pay theirs. You should do that. You should do that immediately.

Jam your senators' phone lines at [phone]. Tell them to vote "no" on the Republican tax bill.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/11/30/1719903/-2400-religious-leaders-sign-letter-condemning-fundamentally-unjust-Republican-tax-bill