Current or modern politics in the United States

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by tsunamiSD

This seems eerily prescient - to think that someone saw that far ahead back in 1998...

To some extent, he's looking backward as much as forward-- this is more or less a description of Nixon and Agnew. Nixon was more polished and reticent, but Agnew embraced this idea with enthusiasm . . . he's foreshadows Trump in every way.

Originally Posted by Spiro Agnew

A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.
An intellectual is a man who doesn't know how to park a bike.
I apologize for lying to you. I promise I won't deceive you except in matters of this sort.
In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.
The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated in a contemporary antagonism known as the generation gap.
A tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government.
Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of bird cages.
Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.
Three things have been difficult to tame: the oceans, fools and women. We may soon be able to tame the oceans; fools and women will take a little longer.
To one extent, if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

Its remarkable that seen from 2017, Agnew appears better spoken than Trump, but he was hitting all the same points.

[tsunamiSD]

Most of the Trump Tax Cuts Would Go to Richest One Percent, Study Finds

Yesterday, Republican leaders unveiled the preliminary version of their tax-cut plan. Today, the Tax Policy Center, the most credible analytical source, published its study of the plan. And the findings are not good.
The first and largest problem for the Republicans is that their plan overwhelmingly benefits a tiny number of extremely affluent people. In 2018, 53 percent of the benefit of the tax cut would go to the highest-earning one percent of taxpayers. In 2027, when more provisions would be fully phased in, the proportion would rise to nearly 80 percent.

Secondarily, the plan also has a total-cost problem. Republicans negotiated a budget agreement allowing for $1.5 trillion in lost revenue over the next decade. That’s a hefty-sized tax cut, but not hefty enough to accommodate all the tax reductions Republicans want. The plan would lose $2.4 trillion over the next decade, TPC calculates.

*****

A House Republican explains why deficits don’t matter anymore

“It’s a great talking point when you have an administration that’s Democrat-led,” said Representative Mark Walker, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group of about 150 conservative House members. “It’s a little different now that Republicans have both houses and the administration.”

*****

Donald Trump's Pants on Fire claim about the estate tax, small businesses and farms

Trump said in his Sept 27th speech: "That means, especially for all of you with small businesses that are really tremendous businesses, you’ll be able to leave them to your family, and your family won’t have to run out and do a fire sale to try and get the money to pay the tax. ... The farmers in particular are affected. They have wonderful farms, but they can't pay the tax, so they have to sell the farm. … So that death tax is a disaster for this country and a disaster for so many small businesses and farmers."

For 2017, the Tax Policy Center estimated, based on past tax data and modeling, that 11,310 individuals will have estates big enough to file an estate tax return. "After allowing for deductions and credits, 5,460 estates will owe tax," the center concluded. "Over two-thirds of these taxable estates will come from the top 10 percent of income earners and close to one-fourth will come from the top 1 percent alone."
The top 10 percent of income earners would pay 88 percent of estate tax revenues, the center found, while the richest 0.1 percent could pay 27 percent.
How about small businesses and farms? The center projected that only about 80 small farms and closely held businesses would pay any estate tax in 2017. That would amount to about 1 percent of all payers of the estate tax that year. And the estate tax revenue from small businesses and farms, the center said, would amount to fifteen-hundredths of 1 percent of the total paid under the estate tax in 2017.

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Its remarkable that seen from 2017, Agnew appears better spoken than Trump, but he was hitting all the same points.

For our younger members, Spiro Agnew resigned from as Nixon's Vice President as part of his plea deal where he pled no contest to a single count of tax evasion. The U.S. Attorney's office had accused him of conspiracy, bribery, extortion and tax fraud. Agnew had accepted payments from contractors during his time as a Maryland official, and the payments had continued into his time as vice president.

As for Mr. Trump, we shall see.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Brian249x

For our younger members, Spiro Agnew resigned from as Nixon's Vice President as part of his plea deal where he pled no contest to a single count of tax evasion. The U.S. Attorney's office had accused him of conspiracy, bribery, extortion and tax fraud. Agnew had accepted payments from contractors during his time as a Maryland official, and the payments had continued into his time as vice president.

As for Mr. Trump, we shall see.

Agnew was a piece of work. Maryland at the time was a famously corrupt State-- was true both of Rs like Agnew and Ds like Marvin Mandel. Maryland pols end up in prison quite often.

Agnew was genuinely funny, a lot of clever quips. My favorite was his comment about the Vice Presidency: “that rare opportunity in politics for a man to move from a potential unknown to an actual unknown.”

One of Agnew's very Trump-apposite flaws was his passion for golf, which pissed Nixon off:
"You’ve got to make it appear that the trip’s for work. Not over there on a goddamn vacation,"

-

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Maryland at the time was a famously corrupt State--
-

A lot of anti-Clinton outrage would have been spared if folks had paid more attention to Arkansas' reputation.

Truth be told, you probably couldn't look too deeply at the politics of a lot of states without becoming skeptical.

[HugoHackenbush]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Agnew was genuinely funny, a lot of clever quips. My favorite was his comment about the Vice Presidency: “that rare opportunity in politics for a man to move from a potential unknown to an actual unknown.”
-

IIRC, the majority of his barbs, particularly the "nattering nabobs of negativism" came from the pen of Pat Buchanan.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by tsunamiSD

Trump said in his Sept 27th speech: "That means, especially for all of you with small businesses that are really tremendous businesses, you’ll be able to leave them to your family, and your family won’t have to run out and do a fire sale to try and get the money to pay the tax. ... The farmers in particular are affected. They have wonderful farms, but they can't pay the tax, so they have to sell the farm. … So that death tax is a disaster for this country and a disaster for so many small businesses and farmers."

This is my favorite bit of bullshit . . . the downtrodden family farmer, forced to sell off his farm because Estate tax is so expensive.

Very, very few Americans have this kind of family farm; ain't how you get rich today.

I know some folks out here who do have family farms on valuable land, but there's a completely simple solution if they want to pass it on to future generations: you put an agricultural easement on the property, essentially give away the development rights to a charitable organization preserving farmland.

Now instead of being valued as perhaps developable land, maybe $300K per acre or more if its someplace nice, its agricultural only land, rarely worth more than $10K an acre, more typically $2500 to $4K . . . you'd have to have an awful lot of agricultural land to have an estate tax problem.

Their claim that this is an issue is BS.

[tsunamiSD]

Yet another case where the current administration can't keep from tripping over their own lies...

Keeping Lies Straight is print version title to this...

It's a 34-page technical paper about corporate income taxes. And it’s a document that matters if you’re trying to game out whether (and how much) enormous corporate tax cuts will trickle down to workers.

Toward the end of the George W. Bush administration, the non-political career people in Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis, a sort of internal think tank, began developing a new model taking into account newer research. In 2012, they released a paper explaining their latest findings: that 82 percent of corporate taxes were borne by capital owners, and 18 percent were borne by labor. Workers don’t literally write the check, of course, but corporate taxes may discourage investment, and therefore lead to lower wages.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has been lately claiming that nearly all of the corporate tax burden is passed on to workers. It’s an argument that he has to make if he hopes to sell the administration’s tax cuts — which even a large share of Republicans opposes — as a helping hand for the Forgotten Man.
On Fox News, Mnuchin claimed that “most economists believe that over 70 percent of corporate taxes are paid for by the workers.” At an event in Kentucky, he declared that “over 80 percent of business taxes is borne by the worker.”

Treasury took the unusual — unprecedented? — step of quietly deleting the inconvenient findings from its website. It’s not clear when this erasure happened. The paper’s disappearance was first reported last week by the Wall Street Journal’s ace tax reporter, Richard Rubin. When I requested an interview with Treasury about the deletion, a spokesperson emailed me that“the paper was a dated staff analysis from the previous administration. It does not represent our current thinking and analysis.”
Which is a peculiar excuse, and not only because the paper was produced by nonpolitical staffers who still work at Treasury. Office of Tax Analysis models get revised all the time; that’s why this paper was produced in the first place, after all.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by tsunamiSD

Yet another case where the current administration can't keep from tripping over their own lies...

Most people won't read this story . .. but they should. This is how people with money steal trillions. Its all eyes-glaze-over stuff, but the dollars are huge.

And the Rs are so utterly craven.

Remember how folks like Mick Mulvaney would bloviate about Obama's deficits?

Here's what he has to say now that he's Trump's Budget director

“I’ve been very candid about this. We need to have new deficits because of that. We need to have the growth,” Mulvaney recently said, according to Bloomberg. “If we simply look at this as being deficit-neutral, you’re never going to get the type of tax reform and tax reductions that you need to get to sustain 3 percent economic growth.”*

Unbelievable

[tsunamiSD]

Payoffs are the only reason that the 'Reds' are trying to push this through - the reporters at the Journal should be ashamed of themselves.

Republicans Angry at Economists for Finding Their Tax Cuts Go to the Rich

Asked about these findings, White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney called the center the “National Tax Center,” erroneously charged that a former economic adviser to Joe Biden works there, and used this imagined fact to discredit its calculations (“It’s not surprising that, you know, a former chief economic for a Democrat vice-president doesn’t like a Republican tax plan.”)

The Journal editorial argues that, while journalists describe the Tax Policy Center as bipartisan, “Its record of hostility to any GOP tax reform that cuts tax rates shows the opposite.” It is true that the TPC regularly publishes reports indicating that Republican tax proposals confer a large proportion of their direct benefit upon the highest-earning households. “The Tax Policy Center hates Republicans” is one way of explaining this fact pattern. Likewise, the FBI’s long-standing pattern of charging members of the Gambino family with federal crimes could be explained as FBI bias against the Gambinos. On the other hand, it might just be the case that the Gambino organization commits a lot of crimes and TPC calculations keep showing that Republican tax-cut plans benefit the rich because Republican tax cut plans always benefit the rich.

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