(11-24-2017 07:33 PM)DavidSt Wrote: The tax cuts from Reagan to now Trump have left many people behind while the wealthy have grown.
How, pray tell, do "tax cuts" "leave many people behind"?
Quote:My parents made less than $10,000 a year in the 1980s, and the economy sucks. They both worked their butts off at minimum wage.
The minimum wage was $3.10 in 1980 and rose to $3.55 in 1981. If they both made the minimum wage, they were both working something less than full time if they made less than $10,000 together, which is what you seem to be suggesting.
Quote:Reagan's tax cut did nothing for us. It helped placed a gap between the middle class and the wealthy, As it is, the Middle Class are slowly shrinking into the working poor.
Oh really? How so? The problem with academics like Piketty and Saez who come up with studies purporting to show this is that there is only one source with data of sufficient granularity to support such a study, and that is the IRS tax database. And yes, it does show income of the "wealthy" rising dramatically after the 1986 Bill Bradley-Dick Gephardt (both democrats) tax reform bill. Why? Because that law not only lowered tax rates dramatically, it also changed the definitions of income dramatically. As a result, many sources of income that the "wealthy" had not previously reported now had to be included, and many deductions that they had previously used to shelter income from taxation were no longer available. Over the decade of the 1980s, the top tax rate went from 70% to 28% and the share of the total tax burden paid by the "wealthy" went UP 7%. Why? Because as their rates went down, their income got redefined. So at the lower rates, they ended up paying more. That's actually a case where lowering tax rates produced higher tax revenues. Unfortunately, a lot of republicans seem not to have understood that it was the redefinition of income that offset the lower rates.
Quote:George W. Bush's paid tax holiday put us into another Great Depression.
Oh, really? How so? The crash of 2008 was caused by defaults on home loans. What did Bush's tax cuts do to cause that? I was not a fan of the "Bush tax cuts" because 1) they were not accompanied by spending cuts, and 2) they were not focused on growth. But they didn't cause the recession job 2008. And what turned it into a lengthy recession with slow recovery was Obama's "stimulus" spending. We've tried "stimulating" our way out of two recessions in history--1929 and 2008. Those are the two that had the slowest recovery. Why? How about all that deficit spending scares the crap out of investors, who know that somebody is going to have to foot the bill someday, so they are spooked out of investing in recovery?
Quote:What did the companies used the money for from the tax cuts? Give CEOs and board members higher pay raises, and buy back stock from investors to inflate the prices of their companies. They never reinvested any money towards the business. That is why Hostess went out of business because of the corruption in the CEO/board members.
They reinvested all right, just not in the US. They reinvested in other countries where costs, including taxes, were lower. Yeah, the jobs sewing up Nikes went to third world sweat shops. But if sewing up Nikes is our economic future, we are in a world of hurt. The way to restore the middle class is to bring back middle class jobs. You can't build a middle class on the minimum wage. The way to bring back middle class jobs is to make the ROI in investing in providing those jobs better here than it is elsewhere. You can bluster all you want about requiring US companies to keep jobs here. But if there costs here are higher than their competitors' costs overseas, all you are doing is driving them out of business. And when a company's CEO and officers are corrupt, it is supposed to go out of business. That's how the world works.
I'm not sure what dream land you live in where companies continue to lose money indefinitely so they can pay workers above market wages while keeping prices below market, but the sky must be different color there. Because everywhere the sky is blue, that won't work. Not ever.
Quote:And Trump's crowing about the 401 K's growing? Only a small number of people in this country have it, and only a few people who invests in the stock market. The majority of people think the Wall Street is a bunch of crocked crooks that steals money from people and refuse to invest in it. Do you blamed people because of the likes of ENRON?
One thing we need is a super 401k where everybody has a piece of the rock. That is the only way that we will ever actually address wealth equality. Do like Sweden and add a privatized component to social security.