Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

It's not Trump. It's not the candidates. It's Republican voters who have created the party they deserve. If the Republicans did not create a safe haven for racists, anti-semites, sexists, misogynists, and assorted yahoos and wingnuts, then Trump and Cruz would still be howling at the moon all alone in the dark of night, as they should be.

The GOP has become the party of greed, the party of "I got mine, fuck the rest of y'all." It began when Ronald Reagan (who himself was far more progressive before he went senile) let Roger Ailes out of his cage, when George H.W. Bush let Lee Atwater start talking to people without someone standing behind him to smack him in the head whenever he said something evil.

The Republicans started down the road to Hell when they adopted the strategy of trying to woo the kind of yahoos who previously sat in bars and garages throughout the soft underbelly of the underclass, resenting the minorities and the deprived who demanded relief from serfdom, demanded a chance to earn a place at the table, and getting it. When White Trash America could no longer point to a class of sub-Americans who were still more screwed than them, they began looking for a voice to push those uppity underclass folk back down, a party to pay corporate America to keep paying them a subsistence wage and provide enough thug cops to keep the coloreds, the Jews, and the furriners in their ghettoes.

You can't survive on the lottery theory of success in America when there are lesser folk actually getting help and making strides. Laffer Curve and Say's Law my skinny White ass.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I think we're saying the same thing.

TM

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I think this may be the singularity, where every single person on the politics board agrees on a point.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

And, I notice, within a day or two of Cruz ending his presidential run, we'll get a new politics board. Start thinking of names.

Re: Cut the Bullshit
 

Before you start talking about Medicare Part D being a huge give-away, let me give you something to chew on. When I had decent insurance, I paid about $250/month for prescriptions, month in and month out.

Under Part D, I start out in January paying about $325/month. Around the beginning of May, I run into what's known as the "donut hole" where I have maxed out the regular benefit of $3310 in prescription benefits. After that, my prescription cost goes to about $1800/month, or 45% of full retail for the next few months until I have paid a bit over $4800 out of pocket, at which point catastrophic coverage kicks in. Once I am at the catastrophic coverage level, I am back to the coinsurance level I am at before I hit the donut hole.

Like many people, I can't really afford a second mortgage payment while I'm in the donut hole, so I just don't buy the drugs I can't afford, except for the ones on which my life depends, like insulin and the drugs that keep me from getting the arrhythmias that cause my defibrillator to discharge every few weeks. That works out to about $600/month.

I don't really look at Part D as a great big giveaway. I look at the pharmaceutical industry as under regulated, with Pharma allocating all its R&D to the US where they are deductible, so that US drug costs effectively underwrite the lower amounts paid by the rest of the developing world.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Except Sebastian.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

There is a lot that can be done to eliminate a big old chunk of income disparity. And it would be easily done. Income is allocated by businesses in part according to whether or not the business can distribute it at a lower effective rate.

Step one would be to amend IRC Section 162(m) so that no deduction is allowed for compensation, current or deferred, in excess of $250,000/year. This won't completely cap all salaries, bonuses, etc., at $250,000. But it would make it more expensive to pay people more than that.

Step two: eliminate preferential treatments for dividends, carried interests, and capital gains. These are all income sources that are enjoyed by the 20% to a much, much greater extent than wage-earners in the bottom 80%. This would allow two things the Republicans regularly call for - less progressivity in tax rates and lower overall rates. This also ties into the point above. Carried interests, dividends, and cap gains on deferred stock and option grants for which a IRC Section 8(b) election has been made would be compensation for which no tax deduction is allowed. This creates an incentive for the business (and shareholders) to favor a compensation structure that allocates more compensation to wage-earners at the sub $250,000 range. To the extent it does this, it accomplishes income distribution through a reduction in income disparity. To the extent companies just bite the bullet and pay the top 20% non-deductible compensation, it provides revenue to fund transfer payments to the lower-earning members of society.

An alternative, one I support wholeheartedly, is a negative income tax. Tax is paid at a single rate on all income. And I mean all income. Capital gains, dividends, carried interests, income that is currently deferred. All of it. Deductions are eliminated. All deductions. No personal deductions at all. Businesses are allowed a costs of goods sold offset to revenue, nothing more.

Debt is no longer favored over equity, which reduces costs of capitalizing a business. Tax planning becomes extinct, so efficiency is increased. Enforcement becomes a simple matter of looking at bank records.

Taxpayers who earn above a threshold pay a tax at a lower rate than now required to achieve desired government revenue levels. Taxpayers who earn below the threshold receive transfer payment equal to the difference between income earned and the threshold amount. Eliminate all other transfer payment structures. No more separate bureaucracies for food stamps, rent assistance, unemployment, disability, AFDC, and general welfare payments.

Lobbyists would shrink dramatically. With no tax breaks for specific expenditures or income, what is left to lobby for. You'd still have the defense lobby, and the various regulated industry lobbies, but imagine how much less crowded the Metro would be without all the folks devoted to arguing that rich people should pay lower taxes and poor people should get more transfer payments.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

How about the Funk is Your Salvation board? But I'll actually stay on topic today with a slinky cut from The Politicians. Funky Toes. Or presumably in the case of one candidate, Tiny Little Funky Toes. Your Daily Dose:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Whs_...BBCC22C839D4BE

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

http://www.redstate.com/uploads/2016...nt-620x329.jpg

I only wish that changing voter registration in Texas was more dramatic than not asking for a Republican ballot in the next primary.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

We are except to the extent you suggest the base was led to where they are now. I think the base has always been that way and they've been looking for a standard bearer.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Interesting. Although, I'm not sure this is the best solution as tons of talent who expect to be paid would flee this country overnight. To the extent they didn't, the costs associated with the eliminated deduction would surely be passed along, making doing business more expensive here and any product created or service rendered more expensive as well.

I'm completely with you on this one. This idea that people would rather not invest if they didn't get this tax benefit is ridiculous. What the hell else are they going to do with their money? Earn nothing out of spite?

I'm listening.

? You'll have to explain that to me. Why would this reduce the costs of capitalizing a business? First, not every business has access to principals with tons of capital to invest. Second, the costs associated with infusions of capital are the loss of return that money could be earning elsewhere.

A whole lot of government employees and accountants wiped out. Maybe not a bad thing.

A few questions:

• How would you distribute the money? It would have to be weekly or people would burn through it as soon as they get it
• Programs like food stamps ensure that the assistance is used for exactly what it's supposed to be used for; you give a ton of people cash instead and their children (who benefit from food stamps at very high percentages) go hungry
• Who does the math on all of this given our government's current state of ineptitude and disingenuousness? I don't think this could ever be instituted fairly

TM

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I think the base was asleep until they were woken up in order to be manipulated into voting for Bush, further manipulated into thinking that any average moron was eligible to be President or VP (hi Palin!) and even further manipulated into voting based on racist hatred and letting them all know it's possible to completely block any and all government action while blaming the black guy for their situation despite his many attempts to alleviate the issues created by the moron they were manipulated into voting for the last time.

TM

This cannot be true
 

I don't know what's real news anymore.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/...n-process.html

TM

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Fair enough, but I'd differ on some of the approaches based on both the effectiveness of the cures and the underlying policies.

How successful do you think 162(m) has been to date? Do we have some analysis suggesting it has had a real impact on limiting the $1 million salaries? I tend to think of this as a section that has mainly benefited tax lawyers without having much real world impact. Much like parachute payments.

Yes. Unlike you, I do buy some of the carried interest analysis, and have trouble crafting a provision that would eliminate carried interest but keep the underlying policy of providing incentive rates for cap gains. BUT, the better solution for me is to completely eliminate the cap gains/ordinary income distinction, since I disagree with its underlying policies anyways.

To some extent we already have a system that is at a disjuncture with the way most of the world taxes its population (eg, our worldwide tax base) but I tend to see two macro- level problems here: (1) the level of disjuncture this creates would lead to capital flight; it is relatively easy to get around a simple tax system using source rules; this will give a huge advantage to the mega-players in the world economy; and (2) I want to use the tax system to kickstart and incentivize certain kinds of investment and growth; at a simple level, I want to apply sin taxes to cigarettes and alchohol given the costs they impost on our society, but that is only the simplest of cases.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I'll confess, I think some of the Republican base doesn't need to be manipulated in the least in order to vote based on racist hatred.

They are voting for what is important to them, and it is indeed racism. They may value their hate more than other issues.