This basically eliminates almost all taxes on the rich, burdens middle and lower class with higher prices, and blows up budget deficit.
So much for FiScAL ReSPonSibiLiTY
Yeah, are you being fiscally responsible, chump? How much are you making? Jeff over here needs another yacht!
The real rich don’t pay any income tax tho? Not sure what you mean. Sure the high-income developers and engineers and lawyers etc. would become a richer, but they are not the rich, are they? The owners of the businesses they work at are. And they don’t pay income taxes.
In the USA in 2021, the top 1% of earners payed 26.3% of federal income from taxes, $3,872,395,000,000 Total. The top 50% of earners payed 89.6% of income taxes.
You could argue that the “true” rich people weren’t earners because they took out loans against their stocks and properties, but they’re either going to sell or die sometime and that has been true for centuries. However, Elon Musk for example won’t make your list if that’s how you measure it because he did sell and he paid billions in taxes.
This freak lost a fucking Casino. The place where people just give you their money. A CASINO!!! He is an idiot and the worst “business man”. Con man looking for a new con.
Not a casino. Multiple ones. Because the dumb fuck decided the best way to run resorts was to have them compete and under cut each other.
Idiot is an understatement.
Unfortunately, I can’t think of a strong enough word, including the one now regarded as a slur.
Fuckwit is my go to. Or “Too stupid to breathe.” Or bring out some Linus Torvalds, but honestly Trump doesn’t deserve to be graced by that mans insults, as awesome as they are from a “JFC dude, that is going way too far”, except Trump would actually deserve them unlike the poor kernel maintainers.
Are you suggesting that Convicted Felon and Sex Offender Treason Trump is not a very stable genius?
That would be… Correct!
Tarrifs on imports?
So basically jacking up prices on all the things made overseas that are cheapest to buy in the US. That affects everyone, especially the poorer people that tend to shop places where that cheap imported stuff is sold because it’s a bigger percentage of their income. It’s gonna affect the middle class the most because they’re probably the biggest consumers. The rich DGAF because well, they’re rich.
Quickest way to put even more people below the poverty line.
things made overseas that are cheapest to buy in the US
Things that are made overseas because American business owners outsourced the manufacturing jobs to the countries with the cheapest labour (and also the least worker protections)?
Yeah, that’s a whole 'nuther discussion besides the tariffs…
What? No, this is the same exact discussion… that is literally one of the primary purposes of tariffs: to give an advantage to local producers.
I think you misunderstand, friend. The ship has already sailed overseas and there aren’t enough “local” producers to make up for the rise in costs faced by the people who shop where the cheap imported goods are and the middle class that consumes the most.
The only advantage is to the government collecting the tariffs on the poor and middle class. Like I said, the rich won’t care.
Yes… that’s literally the point? Tariffs both support existing local producers and are an incentive to move production local.
It’s becoming a problem for Americans because labor leverage abroad (particularly in China and India) have been improving as labor demand eclipses supply.
African and Latin American states (particularly Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, and South Africa) were supposed to be the next places to extract labor, but they keep going Woke, with socialist state governments making demands on exports that Western states don’t want to surrender.
Imperials are running out of countries to exploit.
You’re kinda making the imperials sound good there, if every time they move into a country they start running out of poor people a generation later
If you neglect what they destroy on their way in, perhaps.
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That affects everyone, especially the poorer people
That’s a consequence of outsourcing as much as anything. Tariffs don’t have to mean making retail goods unaffordable for the bulk of the population. When you have domestic industry with room to grow, insourcing your demand can simply mean building out more capital and consuming more labor at home.
But insourcing also means boosting wages and incentivizing immigration, things conservatives hate.
So Trump’s pitch ultimately amounts to giving domestic producers with no intention of boosting production an opportunity to price gouge their clients with the blessing of the state.
Your assumption that things become unaffordable is incorrect, they just cost more.
Prove that wages get boosted. That flies in the face of corporate methodology to cheapen wages and benefits along with product quality in the service of quarterly reports and profits.
Price gouging is already happening. It doesn’t require trump’s ok to allow it.
Prove that wages get boosted.
Wages rise when demand for labor exceeds supply. That’s Econ 101.
That flies in the face of corporate methodology to cheapen wages and benefits along with product quality in the service of quarterly reports and profits.
Wages are kept low by artificially stunting labor demand. That happens either by under-investing in new capital or cartelizing the hiring process.
Price gouging is already happening.
Gouging involves monopolizing supply of commodities. If we increase the supply of capital and the number of hiring firms, that monopolization becomes more difficult.
But if we simply freeze out imports with trade laws, the existing firms can monopolize domestic supply more easily.
None of your replies have any basis other than broad opinion. It’s devoid of manufacturing ability, profiteering, or the corporate price gouging we already experience.
You just wave a magic wand and suddenly the US can defray the manufacturing deficit and will suddenly throw money at the workforce. Must be a nice imaginary world you live in.
broad opinion
K
Lookit you…solved everything with a ‘k’. Pity it isn’t as easy as you handwave away.
“The invisible hand of the free market will save us all!”
It’s very real hands of very real people
While I mostly agree with you, econ101 is a pretty poor argument; early econ courses (like intro to micro and macro) are notoriously not grounded in reality.
econ101 is a pretty poor argument;
You can argue about the goals of economic policy, but that’s very different from arguing the effects.
What is the response to rising labor demand? Do you
- Independently raise wages to the bid price?
Or
- Form a cartel to fix wages below the clearing floor?
The former is the “natural” response you learn about in 101, assuming a naive approach to the problem. The latter is what you learn works best in 201, when your goal is profit maximization.
Nailed it.
Plus rich people can better afford quality stuff made in the USA.
Rich people have enough money that a small percent in price increase doesn’t affect them the way it affects a “normal” person. If you make millions vs 100k/yr combined income it does that the same.
It’s not about quality, it’s about what you’re being sold.
But right now the cheap stuff is made overseas like in Asia. The expanse stuff is built in Europe or the US. Tariffs would likely be harsher on Asia products. So expensive stuff might not get much more expensive at all. The cheap stuff would get much more expensive.
Meaning there’d be a bigger cost percentage increase for the people who already can’t afford it. A double whammy.
Tariffs would likely be harsher on Asia products. So expensive stuff might not get much more expensive at all. The cheap stuff would get much more expensive.
Meaning there’d be a bigger cost percentage increase for the people who already can’t afford it. A double whammy.
That’s pretty much what I said.
Not what I understood from it but okay. I thought you were saying rich people are better able to absorb the cost increase. I was saying the cost increase would also be less for rich people.
That is what I said.
If you say so
This is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.
I’m sure he’ll come up with something dumber tomorrow.
Income tax is such a bitch to deal with. I used to support the idea of replacing it with GST/VAT because then I’d not have to deal with it. But then someone pointed out that disproportionately benefits the rich (who mostly just hold wealth rather than spend it) and disadvantages the poor (who cannot avoid paying for things).
So fuck it. Make it all income tax and get rid of the others! :P
(In before this is also a bad idea somehow)
It should be a moderately progressive income tax. That is to say the lowest earning bracket should pay nothing as a percentage of their income, the next bracket should pay a little bit, the next bracket a little higher % of their income, all the way up to billionaires who should be taxed out of billionaire status. I can certainly afford to pay a higher % of my income to taxes than someone who isn’t sure where their next meal is coming from, but my bosses and their bosses, and the people who own the building should be paying way more on their income than me. Also we need to get rid of the shenanigans that allows the ultra wealthy to avoid income tax altogether through loans and what not.
For clarity, say Kalkaline earns 100k a year. Ideally the billionaires would bring home exactly the same on their first 100k as Kalkaline does.
Marginal tax rate means the higher tax brackets only tax you in the money made above a certain amount. And it’s the same for the next higher up tax bracket, which doesn’t apply to any lower money.
If you’re not getting welfare, there is no “next tax bracket” that’s going to make you bring home less when earning more. That’s not a thing.
If you get a bonus, that might be
taxedwithheld at 50% because payroll is too lazy to figure out your taxes. You get the remainder back when you file your taxes. (Note this may mean you owe $200 at the end of the year instead of owing $1000. That still counts as you “getting” $800.)We could put an 80% marginal tax rate on incomes above a billion dollars, and it wouldn’t really touch someone who was only bringing home 1,030 million dollars a year.
If you get a bonus, that might be
taxedwithheld at 50% because payroll is too lazy to figure out your taxes. You get the remainder back when you file your taxes. (Note this may mean you owe $200 at the end of the year instead of owing $1000. That still counts as you “getting” $800.)One very slight correction in bold.
Also it’s 22% and it’s not solely because payroll is lazy. It’s actually set by federal statute
That must be before other, additional payroll taxes.
Yeah add SS and Medicare to that if you’re not capped already. And of course any state taxe
Edited, thanks.
I’d prefer a 70% tax on billionaires, but I’d settle for 50% for anything above 5million. Take Elon for example, the guy makes an estimated $50,000USD per minute. Yes folks, the guy makes more per minute than the average American does in a year.
prove to me that billionaires should exist. Tax them accordingly.
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Progressive tax brackets make things complicated, in myt opinion. I always like the idea of a large tax free bracket and then taxing. 30-40% for the rest. No tax deduction, everybody has to pay up. You could also go for fixed tax brackets like 15%, 25% and 35% and also no tax deductions.
The problem is that tax deductions/credits are a useful tool for guiding certain activity. We want people to put up solar panels, so we give a tax credit for that.
The other argument for a progressive system is using money for necessities instead of luxuries or investment. Your first $40k or $50k or so is spent on the basic cost of living. After that, you’re using increasing amounts for things you don’t strictly need. So you want to tax that first $50k or so very little, perhaps none at all, and then ramp it up on the people who are just spending money on fast cars or dumping it into SPY or whatever.
There’s a ton of twisty little ways the tax system makes everything fair-ish. Turns out, running a country of 330M people and an annual GDP of $25T is complicated. It’s not always a fair system, but it’s more fair than it looks at first glance.
It’s the most practical tax idea I’ve heard in forty years, tbh.
Heard about the Land Value Tax 41 years ago, huh?
It’s the least practical tax idea I’ve heard in forty years.
Taxes usually start out simple, since that appeals to people. Then over time they get more complicated as people discover more and more edge cases to exploit.
If you make it all income tax, well, what counts as “income”? Elon Musk just got “paid” $46 billion worth of stock in Tesla, for example. But it’s not actually 46 billion dollars. It’s a share in ownership of a company. Those shares can’t actually be sold for 46 billion dollars. Trying to sell them would cause their price to drop. He can’t actually sell them at all right away, for that matter - they’re restricted stock. He has to hold on to them for a while, as incentive to keep doing a good job as CEO.
So if he keeps doing a good job as CEO and the stock goes up in value by 10 billion dollars, was that rise in value income? What if it goes down by 10 billion instead?
This stuff is inherently complicated. I’m not sure that any simple tax system is going to work.
Elon Musk just got “paid” $46 billion worth of stock in Tesla.
He should have to pay income tax on the value of the stock on the day he “took possession” of it.
In 3 years, he says something on Twitter to pump the stock, and dumps a lot of it. He should have to pay tax (capital gains?) on the additional value of the stock that he sells.
If the value goes down and he sells it, it’s a deduction.
I don’t know if this isn’t already a thing, but if he uses that stock as collateral to overpay for another social media company, or some other stupid flex, he should be taxed on that valuation with no deductions whatsoever.
Darn it, you’re right.
And as I suspected would be the case, some other folks have responded to my comment with a bunch of additional “simple” suggestions for what to do in this case. Which have hidden exceptions of their own, which will have unexpected impacts and loopholes, which will then elicit further “simple” suggestions for how to fix them, and before you know it we’ve got a complex tax code again.
There’s an old quote of unclear providence that I think applies here, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”.
No that’s about right. The big problem we have right now is we’ve lost the ability to effectively tax people who don’t live on an “income”. So we need a second system for people who are insanely wealthy.
Be mad that income tax is unnecessarily difficult to deal with. As has been pointed out by others online a lot recently, the US makes personal income taxes hard, where other countries you can fill it out in minutes if you have no deductions, and less than an hour if you do (and have kept good records).
No one likes paying taxes (usually) but since the process is so painless I don’t hear people complaining about income tax that much (outside of the right-wing media in my country, Australia)
Jesus Christ, we learned that fixing the economy via tariffs was bad in 1930. Like holy shit, tariffs are nearly universally agree by every field of economics to be shitty for citizens, businesses, and then the country. It makes no one inside want to buy anything but the simple basics, even with the basics now costing much much more.
I am not a “free trade” person, but this is not how you “Make America Great Again”. Even Ronald Reagan and Dubya didn’t do tariffs as a replacement for other things.
Yes, but Trump has a “relationship with MIT” and a “very good brain” so what would those economists know?
The relationship is knowing MIT and not even knowing what it stands for…
Do you know the real reason why he said he had a relationship with MIT? Because his uncle, John Trump, was a professor there.
I have a cousin who was prominent physicist at a prestigious university. Meanwhile, I dropped out of college. I wouldn’t even dream of suggesting I had any sort of understanding of physics because of my cousin. In fact, he has something named after him and he once tried to explain it to me and I couldn’t understand what the hell he was talking about.
Trump is so stupid that he has no idea how stupid he sounds.
I still stand by my words lmao
He probably thinks it refers to Mitt Romney.
That’s not how anything works. The country exporting to the USA don’t field the tariffs expense. The importers do.
He would just be removing taxes for people like himself to the result of a massive deficit and decreased trade.
I hate Trump, and maybe that’s what he’s thinking.
But I’m not sure replacing taxes with tariffs won’t help; replacing sales taxes with teriffs will mean that domestic products are effectively being subsidized by people buying imported products. This increases demand for domestic products, hopefully stimulation domestic production.
I think the tell isn’t that he is using teriffs, it’s that he wants to cut income taxes at the expense of people buying foreign products.
The USA mainly sells Financial Services and Machinery. Making our own rubber ducks and flatpack furniture would be analogous to a lawyer painting his house when he could have made enough money to pay somebody else to paint it 5x over.
Unfortunately, much of our raw materials are imports so by disincentivizing other countries to trade with us we are killing our own manufacturing capabilities. That is exactly what happened when Trump era steel tariffs killed a large sector of American manufacturing. And he explicitly excluded Russian Steel where his good friend Aaron Abromovich was offering to supply steel for his stupid wall, until congress twisted his arm into signing the additional tariffs against Russia, just another example of how his actions are purely selfish.
At the end of the day, trade is both good and conditional. Other nations might see these actions as hostile and reduce the number of goods they’re willing to sell, as they can’t be the ones left holding the bag if trade suddenly stops one day and they’ve overproduced specialty goods with no use so reducing production is the clear choice, and there is less incentive to offer other less profitable goods as per trade agreements and less incentive to even make new trade agreements in the first place.
You cannot force American CEOs to want to produce goods in the states anymore than you can convince Chinese people to live in the districts where excess homes were built: governments do not have enough control to dictate the markets via anything but positive reinforcement.
It feels like this (common) argument it’s trying to have is cake and eat it too, so maybe you can help me understand.
As you, and everyone, say: the financial burden of the teriffs are paid by the importer and passed to the consumer, rather than being paid by the exporting country or exporter - so what is the disincentive for those countries to continue trade with us? They’ll see a decrease in demand, but is that really a disincentive? I don’t understand how both of these things can be true and have the same cause, at the same time.
The problem is outsourcing, and teriffs are an attempt to make outsourcing less appealing. I understand your analogy, but that’s the problem: we’re encountering Goodhart’s Law. We’re optimizing for GDP, and you’re right that’s teriffs will result in lower optimization, but in chasing GDP numbers we’ve failed to consider where the money is getting allocated. The lawyer could save money by hiring foreigners, but hiring locals helps people in their community. (Not saying foreign workers are bad, just trying to reuse your analogy). I don’t think we should get too preoccupied with economic efficiency, as long as we can ensure the waste stays domestic.
I’m not confident teriffs are actually a good idea, and even if they were I don’t trust Trump to implement them. What I’m trying to do is push back and get clarification about why people are acting like teriffs are inherently bad.
I’m not trying to have the cake and eat it, I’m trying to convince people like you not to shit on the cake just because you think you might be able to eat around it.
What?
Why am I getting down votes?
How am I shitting on anything? What am I even shitting on? \All I’m doing is asking “why do we shit on teriffs and treat them as inherently bad?”
Im trying to have a discussion in good faith, and rather than having any of my questions explained or answered I’m just down voted and vaguely demeaned.I’m being very clear I do not support whatever shit trump is doing, I’m trying to understand why people just hate tariffs.
I don’t understand how, if the importer bares all tariff costs, what would disincentivize a foreign nation from exporting to us since they bear no increased costs. Why would this not just appear as a decrease in demand, from their perspective?I literally explained it to you in simple terms and you still argued against the facts.
Tariffs
Shit on
USA Commerce and Industry
They cannot ever be a replacement for taxation. Their uses are purely as a defence from foreign fuckery in the markets.
You didn’t provide facts, you provided arguments and assertions.
Then I refuted one of your arguments showing how it is seemingly contradicted one of your assertions and asked for elaboration.I don’t understand where your hostility is coming from. I’m not even saying you’re wrong, I’m pointing out arguments that don’t appear (to me) to lead to your conclusion.
I absolutely don’t refute that Trump’s idea is a bad one. My question is more general than that.
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So he’s planning to make the poor pay the taxes for the rich.
No, poor people already pay for the rich. The rich can afford an accountant to find as many loopholes and deductions as possible. The really rich don’t have an “income” and live of capital gains which is already under taxed.
This is just a hope people remember the “no income tax” part and forget about the “raise import tariffs” part when they’re at the ballot.
Always has been
So become 100% dependent on foreign trade… thats a stupid thing to do when conflict is potentially right around the corner
More getting other countries to pay for things I see. The hubris I swear.
Other countries don’t pay tariffs, people who buy the products do. So regular people.
Rich people pay people to design a product, without having to pay their employees income tax> send it overseas to be built > when the product comes back all the consumers pay a ridiculous amount for necessities because the cost of the terrif is absorbed into the price of the product. In the long run, consumers pay the tax in a different form, but the wealthy don’t have to pay that chunk that the employer matches.
He only can get one more term, so I suppose he can promise whatever at this point. It’s not like he’s got credibility consequences for lack of follow through at this point.
The swing states and their votes are:
Nevada (6), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10), Michigan (15), Pennsylvania (19), and Georgia (16).
He needs 38 electoral votes out of that.
Michigan+Pennsylvania+Wisconsin would do it on their own, and they’re all Rust Belt states, so I figure that promising protectionist policy on manufacturing is probably gonna sell well there.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/pennsylvania/
He only can get one more term
Until the corrupt Supreme Court decides to adopt the “unconstitutional constitutional amendment” doctrine and gets rid of that pesky 22nd amendment.
Moot point though because the old fuck will probably die before a third term is even on the table.
SCOTUS wouldn’t rule that. The whole idea of a corrupt judiciary is just a back lash at originalism gaining favor over living constitutionalism. They aren’t ‘evil’ they just don’t have a judicial philosophy from the 1960s.
if you don’t think (at least) Thomas, Alito, Barrett, and Kavanuagh are outright malevolent self-serving sociopathic evil - you haven’t been paying any attention.
He only can get one more term
I’ll just leave these here:
The US Constitution prevents this: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-22/
You say that as if the rule of law matters in a dictatorship.
It’s not like he’s got credibility consequences for lack of follow through at this point.
Implying there was ever a point where this wasn’t true.
That is his dream for everything, it’s how he lives his sham life. And it causes a lot of issues along the way but what does he care, he has a jet and his name on a skyscraper.
Look at this graph, when you know, then you know. Fuck all this distraction from the actual problem, orange man is a distraction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_States
Makes sense that profits went up, since this graph is not inflation adjusted
He’s not a distraction if he gets re-elected.
That’s probably why he won’t win again. It would be amazing to have a convicted felon as president, he’d go from being a distraction to being the thing that causes serious unrest.
I said he wouldn’t win in 2016. I was wrong.
Okay so I’ll say he will win in 2024 so then I’ll be wrong as well. It would be crazy if he won as a convicted felon, after being impeached twice, after losing in 2020 by a landslide.
He did not lose in 2020 by a landslide. That’s just not true.
Biden won the election with 306 electoral votes and 51.3% of the national popular vote, compared to Trump’s 232 electoral votes and 46.9% of the popular vote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_elections
So suggesting he has no chance of winning when he came that close four years ago and he’s likely not lost a huge number of fans is a little premature.
Numbers are even worse when you consider swing states. AZ, GA, and PA swung Biden’s away by a net 40,000 votes. Razor thin margins, for any Dem candidate.
People fixate on the popular vote, but California going Blue by an extra million votes doesn’t change anything
It was only like 43000 votes across several swing states. Not by much at all.
Convicted Felon and Sex Offender Treason Trump did however lose the popular vote in a landslide and the electoral vote in a landslide.
I guess “landslide” is pretty subjective. The difference was 74 electoral votes, 7,059,526 voters. He only won
Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes in 2016, Clinton won the popular vote by 2,868,686 votes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election_in_Michigan
I don’t like this system so I’m done speculating.
I agree with the Squid. We should all be worried. He came ridiculously close last time. Remember the electoral college is not helping. It was basically thousands of votes in 2020 that saved us.
Trump got the 2nd most votes of any presidential candidate in history in 2020. It wasn’t a landslide.
Trump is currently favored in polls and in betting markets. Few people care about the convictions. People who would vote for him definitely don’t care about impeachments. The far-right has a very effective and expansive propaganda machine (old media, alternative media, and social media) that can counter any negative (“fake”) news. Biden is a very weak candidate because of his physical and mental health, and the Democrats are ineffective at “controlling the narrative” compared to the Republicans. I think it’ll probably be a close election, and if I was forced to bet, I’d bet on Trump winning.
That doesn’t sound amazing at all, that sounds totally horrible
Yea, amazing wasn’t the right word choice. Probably should have used “absurd”, “ridiculous” or “bizarre” instead.
Amazing - causing great surprise or wonder; astonishing
Nah you were all good imo lmao people just attribute amazing to positivity
Tax the rich, give the middle and lower class tax breaks. It would fix so much.
I mean, the Brownback Experiment nearly broke Kansas, but what if we scaled it up to 50 states?
It might just work! /s
Someone did the math and realized we would need a 130% tariff on all goods to replace current income tax revenue.
People’s number one concern is inflation. If that tariff is created we will see 100% inflation over night!
Someone did the math and realized we would need a 130% tariff on all goods to replace current income tax revenue.
And probably didn’t take into account that actually the tariff would need to be even higher since imports would drop drastically from the current amount.
I believe 130% was the conservative estimate.
Eat the rich. Tax the motherfuckers.
Oh yes! /c/eattherich@kbin.social
