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Everytime it happens the middle class takes a permanent pay cut and a hit to their assets and the 1% scoops those pay,

Its only been that way in "our" lifetime, or the workplace post Ronald Reagan.

What bothers me is the banking crash in 2007-2008. In previous eras, when banks screwed up (savings & loans crash in the 1980's), somebody went to prison. The 2007 crash was caused by the deregulation from the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, and the Fed Reserve/Treasury/Congress permitting the use of derivatives to get around loan regulations. Leave it to the investment banks to bitch about reckless "subprime" loan lending. No one was "forcing" them to make the loans; they just thought they would be untouched by its consequences from their use of derivatives. In any case, all the top assholes got away.

Instead, we had the Fed breaking unspoken rules with its 0% interest lending window, QE & QE2. These programs may have "saved" the banking industry, but it only benefited the investment class, which is why there is a magnitude more wealth disparity in the US today.

And now this financial chicanery has leaked throughout the legal system. You have pharmaceutical companies pushing synthetic heroin with almost zero consequences. Jackholes like Shkreli who should never have been in their CEO positions as long as they have. Basically, if you have a degree from an Ivy School and rich, somehow you can't be a criminal and suffer legal consequences. (I'm really peeved that I can't remember at this moment more examples of this systemic criminality.) Finally, you have that legal/ethical joke that is Donald J. Trump. I can also point out where the courts have reenabled political corruption with the Citizens United ruling, and the Bob MacDonnell conviction reversal, which has allowed weasels like Menendez to keep his Senate seat.

The economic tsunami which is Social Security in the 2030's is coming up, and the solution that Democrats propose is to expand medicaid coverage to cover everyone. The real solution is for the US to move to a health care funding system that works, (which is partly expanding medical coverage to everyone) but driving down health care cost inflation caused by our current system. This means there will be a lot of unhappy doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and insurers getting their revenues slashed to meet European standards. And a lot of unhappy voters that may not get their health care issue subsidized, because its either hellishly expensive, or everyone is better off if you croak. 85-90 year olds are not entitled to free hip replacement surgery if a case can be made that they're going to die or stay an invalid in 5 years anyway. Pregnant women are not entitled to free fetal surgery. Just because science can save or immeasurably benefit a life at extreme financial expense, doesn't mean society should be obliged to subsidize it. Long term, financial disaster is looming for the US, but the Republican solution is to increase the budget deficit by another 5.5 trillion in the next 10 years.

In the second paragraph of your source it says "The Treasury Department reported this week that individual income tax collections for FY 2018 totaled $1.7 trillion. That's up $14 billion from fiscal 2017". Wow, up $14B out of $1.7T, around 0.8% growth in an economy with around 3.5% growth. Way up!

Reading the article further does supply some useful numbers:

The only category that was down? Corporate income taxes, which dropped by 31%.
Overall, federal revenues came in slightly higher in FY 2018 — up 0.5%.

So actual revenues are only up 0.5% (several other sources say 0.4%), that's less than inflation so in real dollars revenues are down (this non-profit, bi-partisan organization estimates down 1.5% in real-money terms and down 4.3% in relation to the GDP) . Corporations are paying a lot less and individuals are paying a little bit more, and the difference is being added to the deficit. The revenue is much less than the Republicans claimed it would be when the tax cuts were being debated, heck Mnuchin said that revenues would rise so much that it would actually decrease the deficit instead of the $1.5 trillion the CBO estimated at that time it would add to the debt over the next 10 years. Even that outlook was too rosy, they CBO says the current estimate of the tax cut's cost is adding $2 trillion in debt. Calling revenue that is falling in real dollars "way up" is par for the course for you, but limit your hyperbole to "tens of thousands of dollars" per illegal immigrant, bullshit claims on taxes are too easily refuted.

Maybe you are not skilled or poorly skilled in Google Foo but it is widely accepted that it isn't a complete waste.

I didn't say it was net negative, budget-wise, just that there are surely much better investments for taxpayers. If, for example, avoidance of lost revenue is to be pursued here, as the article seems to suggest, what about stopping gutting the IRS instead? Taking the numbers from that article of yours at face value (which doesn't even seem to suggest any operational cost for the project, or did I misread it?), the wall is peanuts compared to the uncollected taxes.

And who added the first half of that debt?

Errr not Trump ? Little defensive there aren't you chief ?

Not really, just laying the ground work for pointing out that the Republicans are on track to match Obama. Bush was in eight years responsible for somewhat less than half of the current US debt, Obama added the second half in eight years, Clinton was responsible for much of the rest. So far Trump has added $1.46 trillion to the national debt in just 19 months and if that rate of debt collection continues he'll probably add more than even Obama did. This projection put Trump's national probable debt increase at 8-9 billion if he remains in office for 8 years and If things continue as they are doing today. That means that Trump will bring the US national debt to between ~29 billion by 2024. However, keep in mind this projection is six months old and Trump has already blown the projected debt increase for 2017 and 2018 combined in only 19 moths.

Millennials are 1000 times better than live beyond yo u reans baby boomers who have racked up 22 trillion in debt and are going to make their grandkids pay it off for them.

Right now to reach break even government spending we need 10% annual growth in tax revune. Instead we get tax cuts and vague promises. By 2040 the us government will be completely bankrupt at the current rate of spending vs income. As it sits now 25% of our federal budget goes to pay interest payments on debt. Not prinicipal just interest. That debt is primiarily owed to the be people of the USA.

Put that on perspective. That means if you earn $300k annually your interest payments are $88k and your principals is in millions.

There is no way out of this and that is 100% due to the lazy fucking stupid boomers

Sooner or later, most forms of government fall into this trap. Politicians or the powers-that-be want to stay in power, and delivering benefits to constituents (lobbyists and individuals) while not raising taxes is a surefire way to keep getting elected. Just look at for how long the gas tax has not been raised (25 years). The only potential problem is to not be the guy in charge when the debt becomes unsustainable. And even then, the worst that will likely happen to the politician is they will have to retire from politics and be a consultant for the companies that they did favors for.

It is difficult for a politician to take actions that have short term pain but long term gain. It is hard or impossible to get elected under such a platform - the attack ads become insurmountable. So the platforms become extremely vague and it is impossible to tell what a politician will do if elected. In these situations, there is little the voters can do to solve the problem. It generally takes a banking crisis or high interest rates to trigger meaningful reform.

The CBO scoring assumes we'll maintain the wonderful 1.6% growth we had with President Obama.

Even the rosiest "dynamic scoring" of the bill by the Treasury Department has the tax bill increasing growth by 0.03 to 0.09 points per year. That's the Trump Treasury Department. For the tax bill to pay for itself, it would require a 0.8 to 0.9% growth bump. To create your "surplus", it would require even a bigger bump in growth, year over year, for 10 years.

Here's a good rundown from the CRFB, which is the organization headed by one of Ronald Reagan's former economic adivsors:

http://www.crfb.org/papers/can...

the wonderful 1.6% growth we had with President Obama. Rescoring with the historical average (and what we've seen this year) of 3.5%,

First, the economic growth has not hit 3.5% this year. At best, we're seeing 3.2%, with 0.4% increase in personal income. The "1.6%" figure you quote is for 2016. Growth was 2.4% in 2014 and 2.6% in 2015.

Also, let me remind you that in Barack Obama's first 11 months in office, the stock market rose by 29%. In Donald Trump's first 11 months, the increase was 24%. And under Obama, that happened without a $1.7 trillion gift to the wealthiest Americans.

The US federal budget for prisons is less than $10 billion while the budget for entitlements is 2.33 trillion, basically prisons are rounding error in the kind of thing that they'd like to cut.

But hey, you pulled some numbers out of your backside - totally convincing!

Except it wasn't about those numbers in the way you portray it.

The point being made, was that the gun-rights activists would choose to cut 1 million from welfare, but gladly endorse 100 million in prisons. Not to make any real point of scale. And this is born out in the analysis of Trumperton's budget. Look at his spending priorities.

These are the people who vote for 3-strikes laws, who vote for 10-20-life. Who scream for marijuana criminalization. Who freaked out over civil-unions so badly they guaranteed same-sex marriage.

But anyway, looking at the numbers, the federal government has about 10% of the nation's prisoners, so you're ignoring the other 90%.

but hey, look at the spending increases, look what we're getting

You do realize that those are Evangelical/social conservatives, not pro-business/small government conservatives, right? They don't even overlap that much.

Too bad for the ones who made the choice of their tent-mates then.

Hyperbolic fear-mongering at its most absurd. "Less government intrusion" is literally a cornerstone of their political philosophy, but in your mind that makes them fascists.

Nope, it makes them HYPOCRITES. Was that hard for you to grasp?

That you fail to grasp it, well, that's part of the hypocrisy. You'll never deal with it.

Talking about debt isn't helping your case any. Here's the deficit (change in debt) from year to year: Link

Why is that Republicans keep blowing the budget? Well, let's look at the case of Bush. Wow, whodathunkit, massive tax breaks to top income earners skyrockets debt, news at 11! And yes, having the government hawk itself into debt is great for the short term strength of the stock market.

Re, debt outlook under Trump: absolutely not if he enacts his "Bush Tax Cuts+++ proposal.

The second one is a pretty strong argument by itself, but independent of that, Trump's tax plan will bankrupt the country even more thoroughly than it already is, while giving 90% of the benefit of tax cuts to people with the very highest income. Clinton's plan places most of the benefit in the middle class and mostly bills the very wealthy, who are the ones that have benefited the most from economic progress over the last few decades, without adding nearly as much to the debt. One of the more obvious indications of the difference is that Clinton's personal tax bill would go up substantially, while Trump's would ... well, it's hard to assess given that he has disclosed almost nothing about his taxes other than the likely possibility that he manages to pay almost nothing thanks to loopholes in real estate tax laws, and he and his family would probably benefit enormously from his plan to eliminate estate taxes (which already apply only to people earning >5 million or so).

Independent evaluations of Trump vs. Clinton's economic and tax plans are pretty uniformly negative with regards to Trump's plan, whereas they are fairly neutral or positive about Clinton's.

Say what you will about Clinton, but at least she hasn't run hundreds of millions of dollars worth of casinos into the ground while claiming they are successful business people, leaving investors holding the bag, and then said they'll apply the same dubious experience to running the country. This is one situation where picking the lesser of two evils should be pretty damned easy.

The bulk of what these companies get in "tax breaks" are really just business expenses or common things like depreciation and the like.

Sure, I imagine so. Oil companies have a lot of equipment and other capital investments that depreciate, so that's probably a giant portion of it.

So, you are saying my "Child Tax Credit" is a subsidy of children?

Yes! Absolutely! Just like the home mortgage interest deduction is a subsidy for taking out a mortgage. Which is really just a bank subsidy once the market has factored everything in. Congress has done a great job of creating subsidies that cost other taxpayers money and convincing the majority of taxpayers that they're just "cutting taxes." But if I cut Bob's taxes and raise yours to cover it, it's no different than if I raise your taxes and cut Bob a check. But one of them is out of control spending and pork while the other one is just "cutting taxes" which is good and holy.

I say there are no tax breaks that amount to subsidies for big oil of any significance. You say they exist. So you need to produce the evidence of subsidies you claim exist.

I didn't say anything about oil-specific tax credits--just that tax credits are subsidies. And you've hedged very carefully with "of any significance," so I'm going to guess that it's very unlikely that anything I post will help here. But a quick Google indicates that there are tax breaks that are specific to extractive industries (most of which are enjoyed by the oil industry) like the ability to deduct intangible drilling costs in one year rather than over time. Intrestingly, it looks like the oil industry's breaks come largely in the form of reshaping how they do depreciation and deduct costs, so everything still ends up being "just depreciation." Anyway, most big politically-connected industries have weird cut-outs in the tax code like this, so I don't think it should be surprising that spends millions on lobbying has a few.

My solution to this type of thing would be to dump the corporate income tax entirely and raise dividend, capital gains, and estate taxes in a revenue-neutral way to make up the difference. We'll never get a corporate tax code that isn't full of bizarre exceptions for powerful industries, and corporations have huge financial flexibility to move money around and work around the laws, so I say we just let corporations act in an economically sensible way and tax the money when it's transferred to human owners.

Correct. 90% of GDP is the number most economists agree is the threshold, and the USA is just about at it, depending on how you count the debt. (Most of our "debt" is dollars we owe ourselves. Is it really debt if you owe yourself a dollar? Maybe, but it's sort of complicated.) There are a zillion citations the GP can look up but here is one.

Luckily for our economy we can "simply" inflate our way out of debt, and I think we should. Rich people don't like this solution because inflation hits rich people while helping poor people. That's because rich people don't work, they coast on their savings and their savings loses value during inflation. Meanwhile, poor people work and wages rise with inflation, so the poor certainly don't get ahead but they mostly don't fall farther behind either. Because rich people run the world, economic policy is to hold inflation to nearly zero.

Some nasty rich people even want to return to the gold standard which would cause massive deflation, making the savings of rich people worth *more*. It's a brilliant feint on their part to fool "libertarians" into supporting their greedy bullshit.