national debt

Trump tax plan: twice as many corporations pay no taxes

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While many taxpayers are scrambling to make last-minute payments due to the Internal Revenue Service on April 15 because of changes to tax withholding in the Trump tax bill enacted by a Republican Congress, “many of the country’s largest publicly-held corporations are doing better: They’ve reported they owe absolutely nothing on the billions of dollars … Read more

All that glitters is not gold in the new Gilded Age

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On Friday the government said that the economy grew at a 4.1 percent annual rate last quarter.

Naturally our egomaniacal Twitter-troll-in-chief, who always speaks in exaggerated superlatives, tried to claim that this was the biggest, bestest, greatest economic achievement by any president ever in the history of the world!

Not even close, dumbass. Fact check: Mr. Trump cited a long list of indicators of how well the economy has performed on his watch, some lacking context or foundation. Barack Obama had three quarters besting Trump’s best quarter.

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Economists caution that the latest acceleration, while good news for American businesses and households in the short term, is unsustainable in the long term and could raise the risk that the recovery will flame out in the years ahead.

The quarter’s figures were pumped up by a range of one-time factors — including a surge in exports tied, at least in part, to Mr. Trump’s trade policies, as foreign buyers rushed to stock up on American goods before tariffs took effect — that are unlikely to recur. Most forecasters expect growth to cool in the second half of the year — even without factoring in the possibility of a trade war, which corporate executives in recent weeks have cited as a source of uncertainty that could force them to pare hiring and investment plans.

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The GOP tax bill is generational theft that steals from our future

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Republicans only care about the federal deficit and national debt when Democrats are in charge of Congress and the White House.

When Republicans are in charge, “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter,” as Dick Cheney infamously once said.

Remember when Republicans used to say that the national debt was “generational theft” from future generations of taxpayers? Funny how we are not hearing this from Republicans now.

But here is a recent example from Neal Urwitz at the conservative Newsmax, regarding the current GOP tax bill that will add another 1.5 trillion dollars plus to the national debt in order to give tax cuts to corporations and Plutocrats. It’s Not a Tax Cut — It’s Generational Theft:

Hey Baby Boomers — if you could stop stealing from my generation, we’d really appreciate it.

To be clear, I’m referring to President Trump’s tax-cut proposal. His proposal, if enacted, would increase the federal government deficit by trillions of dollars. Sure, the administration claims it’ll be revenue neutral, but there’s no way that’s true.

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So it’s simple math: taxing less + spending the same amount = massive deficit.

Sure, some people argue that the increased economic growth from tax cuts will make up the resulting deficit — this theory is known as the Laffer Curve — but even Republicans don’t really believe that anymore. The theory has simply been tried and failed too many times for anyone to reasonably think it’ll work this time.

To state the obvious, if we accumulate massive debt as a nation, someone has to pay the piper. And that is going to be all the generations after the Baby Boomers …

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The upshot is my generation will have to pay much higher taxes and will have less money for the things we’ll need in the future — like sophisticated defense, functioning education, homeland security, or fixing our crumbling infrastructure. Oh, and we’ll have to do it with anemic economic growth.

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