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That's the rightwing Repug straw man of Oprah-style "free everything for you and you and you", which isn't being proposed by anybody. But it's believed by the stupid, ignorant ing Repug base.
Anyone that thinks we can have free health care, free college and universal basic income just by raising taxes on the "rich" is ing stupid.
That's the rightwing Repug straw man of Oprah-style "free everything for you and you and you", which isn't being proposed by anybody. But it's believed by the stupid, ignorant ing Repug base.
I agree, in addition to raising marginal taxes let's bring back the estate tax, treat capital gains as regular income, tax pass though income, crack down on tax avoidance, get rid of the mortgage exception -- and raise payroll taxes to the extent necessary.
remove the cap on social security taxes while we’re at it
Boo, you don't support free health care, free college and universal basic income?
close all the loopholes passed by Repugs to allow the wealth and BigCorp to avoid paying their share.
eg, "inversion" and "carried interest"
iow, the rigged economy.
But because only the rigged/owned politicians, who wonderfully benefit from the rigging, can unrig the economy, the rigging will not be touched. America is ed and un able.
People talking about "balanced budget" while promoting, making HUGE tax cuts for the oligarchy who STILL evade/avoid the remaining taxes, are hiding that the balancing will be on the poor, retired, vets, sick, young, non-whites, by privatizing everything so everything costs more and is tier.
You want to raise taxes across the board? Why?
And, because of new tax law, you either pick standard deduction, which is almost double what is was, or, you itemize, which includes things like mortgage interest deduction.
Btw, what is mortgage exception?
To pay for free , duh.
There's at least two, one state and one federal:
https://www.bankrate.com/calculators...alculator.aspx
http://www.houseloanblog.net/homestead-exemption/
You're talking about liberal pundits and media, though, not Democrats in office. That's the important difference. The conservative standard for divisiveness is celebrities giving preachy speeches at an awards show. Meanwhile the current Vice President is staging walkouts of football games to keep people talking about anthem protests. Electing politically incorrect shock jocks isn't the answer to pushing back on PC on social media and in culture.
Can self-proclaimed "small government and fiscally responsible" conservatives explain why cuts to military spending are never on the table? We have some 600 bases around the world (and yes, an unknown number of those "bases" are small parcels of land with radio towers or something weird like a 144sqft empty space in Canada), but many of the big European bases are holdovers from the post-World War 2 where US military might was the only line of defense a rebuilding Europe had against a feared Soviet Union. The EU has a capable military, so I don't see the point in having European bases any longer.
"But China/Russia are building these super weapons! Oh no! If we cut military spending, we won't keep up with them in the arms race!" Total bull . MAD was proven during the Cold War. As long as nukes exist, no country possessing nuclear weapons will dare attack one another. North Korea is the biggest violator of human rights in the world, and we haven't lifted a finger against that regime because of their "Samson Option" artillery strategy. If they get any hint of an impending invasion, they're basically going "nuclear" on Seoul without nuclear weapons. Example of how effective such a tactic is. This is basically why we restrict our military involvement toward nukeless countries with ragged militaries comprised of goat farmers. And our multi-trillion dollar expenditure has done a lot of good in trying to nation build in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But yeah, expect a multi-trillion price tag for the "Space Force" or whatever, and middle America will sign off on it with Red, White, and Blue pride. But healthcare for all? Socialism!
I agree about the military part. We spend way too much.
"MAD was proven during the Cold War."
the "intermediate" bull is that USA and Russia would nuke "intermediate" Europe, but not each other mutually.
to nation-state measuring
It also doesn't make sense that we're supposedly countering Russian and Chinese "super weapons" by continuing to waste billions on antiquated military technology that hasn't been used since WWII (tanks, submarines, aircraft carriers, fighter planes, etc.). By far the biggest Russian and Chinese threat we face is with cyber security, if we want to spend money on defense, it should be to bolster our cyber infrastructure. Otherwise, if Russia and China want to go bankrupt building "super weapons" that don't really matter in the nuclear age, we shouldn't try to beat them in a race to the bottom. This is even before considering how much other useful the troops we have stationed all over the world could be doing (fixing roads and bridges, improving our energy grid (which is laughably ty compared to countries like Germany)) or how much money we spend on the additional healthcare needs of veterans after we send them to fight stupid wars.
A lot of stuff like bloated military spending has essentially become a job program masquerading as something else in order to put a band-aide on the giant gap that exists between the supply of low or no skill labor in this country vs. the demand for it, and that's a part of why it sticks around imo. Lockheed Martin alone has 100,000 employees and the overwhelming majority of them would be out of a job overnight if our military spending was at the level of EU countries. I'd also put the War on Drugs in that bucket too. We'd have god knows how many prison guards, drug enforcement police, prosecutors, etc. who would all be on their ass without the drug policy we've had since Nixon. The amount of jobs that get created by government programs Conservatives want even though the free market has no demand for those jobs is about as socialist as it gets.
if there really was an en lement to cut back, it would be pensions for many government employees.
No . They are just about the only ones left with defined benefit retirement plans, and they can retire in their 50s.
yep, govt employees have it good, so we MUST pull them down to the show precarity of private employees.
Private Labor knows it is ed by Capital,
and that there's no way they, gradually disempowered, marginalized, instantly frog-marched disposable over 45 years, can get back to 1945-1970 happy boat floating.
SA just did the same by insulting and pulling down Sheryl Sculley, who by every measure had done and was doing an excellent job, but the losers said she was making too much money, doing excellent work for too many years, so she had to go.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 02-01-2019 at 02:10 PM.
How much money is that though? I'm fine with doing it but I don't think it moves the needle very much.
federally i'm actually not sure. its a big drain in CA, so im probably just thinking from a local perspective.
edit:
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/breakdown
according to this, more than military spending
Holy , that’s a lot, yeah I agree we definitely need to change that.
i'm all for carving exceptions for certain professions... law enforcement, first responders, that sort of thing. on the state level i'm fine with giving it to teachers too given the atrocious state of their pay levels.
but everybody pays into and receives social security, why the extra benefits here?
the problem is good luck getting elected on that platform
The pendulum swung too far; redistribution has gone to the upper range of incomes for fifty years, wages and buying power at the bottom have stagnated and fallen, respectively.
Health care and college cost too much. If something isn't done to mitigate that, we're de facto underinvesting in our future productivity; continuing to cut taxes would be penny wise for pound foolish.
America first ain't cheap.
Similar to social security, im guessing a lot of these pension plans are using actuarial projections that haven’t been updated in decades, so they’re still using life expectancy assumptions that are falling way short. At the very least that needs to be updated.
Good luck selling that to a bunch of older people with 20-30 years left to live.
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