Tax Cuts
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Thursday, April 17, 2025 01:12
VIEWED: 22355
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Senator Sherrod Brown challenged Senate Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch: Why were Republicans about to pass tax cuts for corporations and business owners while the Children’s Health Insurance Program remains unextended?
Hatch reacted with fury. “Nobody believes more in the CHIP program than I,” he shot back. “I invented it. We’re gonna do CHIP. There’s no question about it in my mind, and it’s gotta be done the right way. The reason CHIP’s having trouble is we don’t have any money anymore.”
“I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger, and expect the federal government to do everything,” Hatch said. “Unfortunately, the liberal philosophy has created millions of people that way, who believe everything they are or ever hope to be depend on the federal government rather than the opportunities that this great country grants them.”
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/5/16733784/senate-tax-bill-orr
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Hatch was saying that there’s no money to extend CHIP, which would cost less than 1 percent of the cost of the tax cuts Hatch supports. You can tell what a party really cares about by watching what they’re willing to pass, financing be damned. When it comes to a program like CHIP, a policy founded with Republican support that literally provides health insurance for poor children, “We don’t have any money,” as Hatch said on the Senate floor.
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I see that Senator Hatch is emotionally defending what is best for Hatch: a tax cut for the rich.
Senator Hatch has an estimated net worth of $4.96 million as of 2014, making him a fair amount wealthier than the average member of Congress and the richest among all members from Utah.
Hatch's net worth was 4.7 times more than the average member of Congress and 81% more than the average senator.
http://members-of-congress.insidegov.com/l/374/Orrin-G-Hatch
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The Tax Bill Shows Yet Again Republicans Only Care About States’ Rights When It Serves Them
“States’ rights” was the rallying cry of Republican governors challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and it was the animating ideal behind President Donald Trump’s decision this week to reduce the size of two federal monuments in Utah.
When state governments enact progressive policies at odds with Republicans’ national agenda, however, national GOP leaders do not hesitate to run roughshod over their supposedly cherished federalist principles.
“Their principal goal is to subdue and dismantle the welfare state,” and defending states’ rights is sometimes a means to that end, Gerstle argued. “Once states are no longer useful to them, in terms of their ambitions, they will quickly abandon their commitment to states’ rights.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/republicans-states-rights-progres
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Apple could get a $47 billion windfall from the tax bill and even Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, has explained this won’t boost investment. That pretty much shoots down the GOP's justification for the tax cut as a job creation act.
Richard Waters and Tom Braithwaite at the Financial Times ran the numbers yesterday and found that the Republican tax plan’s largest single winner is going to be Apple. For a sense of scale, that would cover four years’ worth of the federal tab for the Children’s Health Insurance Program which provides coverage to 9 million kids but is currently on hiatus since congressional Republicans say they can’t find the money.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has explained over and over again that shoveling billions into his corporate treasury won’t boost his investment spending.
He already has plenty of cash, but beyond that, when Cook wants Apple to invest more, he borrows the money.
Apple doesn’t really need any cash on hand to make investments.
Interest rates are low these days, and interest payments are tax deductible — and Apple keeps a lot of its balance sheet cash on the books of subsidiaries incorporated in offshore tax havens. Apple’s cash-management game is to bide its time until it gets a tax windfall (i.e., soon, if Republicans get their way) and then kick the windfall out to shareholders in the form of dividends or buybacks. It’s an important part of their overall corporate strategy, but it has nothing to do with investment or job creation, again, the GOP's fake justification for the tax cut.
The only thing Cook gets wrong is when he says Apple is in an “unusual” position in that regard. For all the same reasons that Apple doesn’t need extra cash to finance investment, no other company does either. Indeed, Apple’s own balance sheet “cash” consists largely of bonds — money that Apple loaned out to other corporations and contributes to the low interest rate environment in which it’s easy for companies to raise money for investment.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/8/16746034/apple-gop-tax-bill
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Quote:Evil, you say? You are unfamiliar with Texans. The majority will continue to vote Republican, congratulating themselves for preserving goodness, regardless of what laws Congressional Republicans pass and Republican Presidents sign. Nothing will ever change Republican minds about how they must forever oppose the wicked Democrats and their evil social programs wasting precious tax dollars that ought to go to the military. For example:
Originally posted by G:
Second - this is the thing. Everyone knows that the Republicans are lying and filling their masters' pants with cash. Voters, non-voters, children above the age of 5 know. But there's nothing we can do about. "Vote?!?" Yeah, right. Of all the remarkable lines in the sand that the Republicans and Trump and his global mafia have crossed, nothing will be as dramatic and telling as if Roy "the good ole days when we had slavery" Moore wins in Alabama. Talk about enshrining themselves as the party of pure evil. But we already know this.
U.S. tax revamp still incomplete as Republicans eye social program cuts
www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fiscal-entitlements/u-s-tax-revamp-stil
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Even before completing their overhaul of the U.S. tax code, Republicans in Washington have begun turning their attention to changes and possible cuts in the social safety net of government programs for the poor, children, elderly and disabled Americans.
President Donald Trump, House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republican officials in recent remarks have made clear that welfare or “entitlement reform,” as they often call it, will be a top priority for them in 2018.
“Next year, we’re going to have to get back to entitlement reform,” Ryan said on a radio talk show on Wednesday.
In Republican parlance, “entitlement” programs mean food stamps, housing assistance, Medicare and Medicaid health insurance for the elderly, poor and disabled, as well as other programs created to assist the needy. . . .
“The Republicans’ next chapter will be, ‘Oh, we have a deficit, we have to do something about it, let’s cut Medicare and let’s cut Medicaid,” Democratic Senator Ben Cardin told a news conference on Thursday.
Enacting the tax bill would trigger automatic cuts to a variety of programs, including Medicare, due to a congressional budget rule that requires laws that increase the deficit to offset it with cuts to mandatory spending programs.
The “pay-as-you-go” rule applies to the Medicare health insurance program for the elderly and disabled, but cuts to that program would be capped at 4 percent, or up to $28 billion in 2018, according to government estimates.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Republicans Bet Tax Cuts Would Help Their Political Fortunes. They May Have Misread That
Republican strategists for months have been urging lawmakers to notch a victory on taxes — anything, really, would count — so that they can have something to run on next year. So urgent the need, the argument went, that having nothing to show in 2018 could give Democrats’ a majority in the House and maybe even the Senate.
What they didn’t count on is this: for the first time in modern polling, tax cuts are more unpopular than tax hikes. That’s right, the Republican tax cuts that are likely to become law before the end of the year are underwater in the polls by 14 percentage points.
http://time.com/5056851/republicans-tax-cuts-bill-paul-ryan/
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Meh... I guess we'll see when the elections happen. Clinton was regularly up 14% or more in the polls as well.
It wouldn't surprise me if this poll was accurate though. Most people I've ever known can't even fill out their own personal income tax return. It's easy to convince stupid people of anything you want when you can manipulate their emotions.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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The tax bill is junk, hastily drafted and full of exploitable loopholes. Once the tax lawyers and accountants get to work, they will find ways for their clients to avoid hundreds of billions in taxes that the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates assume will be paid. www.jct.gov
Imagine yourself as a wealthy, liquid taxpayer experiencing a surge in after-tax income because your accountant has found clever ways to exploit the idiocy of new legislation. It will be fun and lucrative, but you’d have to suspect that the fun will end eventually – that even this GOP, with this leadership, will eventually close the most outrageous loopholes.
We know what Ryan and McConnell will try to do before closing the loopholes: they'll try to use new deficits, larger than predicted, as an excuse to cut safety-net programs. But will they be able to get away with this with the memory of the tax scam still fresh in everyone’s memory? I’m pretty cynical about centrists and the propensity of the media to be taken in by charlatans, but I think this would probably be a bait and switch too far.
Put it this way: Republicans would surely use big deficits as an excuse to propose big cuts in social programs, but they’d face a barrage of hostile media coverage, plus lots of public demonstrations as in the case of health care, all reminding everyone that these deficits were created by their own dishonest promises just a few months earlier.
And imagine, as we should, that all of this would go along with many front-page stories about dubious business types abusing the new loopholes. Quite probably a political disaster for the GOP as it becomes clearer that their tax policies reward scammers.
www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/opinion/what-happens-if-the-tax-bill-is-a-r
evenue-disaster.html
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Hope you've been investing in that moat that I suggested to you a while back, Second.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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