Lowering Corporate Tax Rates The Coward’s Way

[g5000]

As I have explained many times, every time you give a special interest a tax break, someone else has to make up the difference. This is achieved by raising tax rates on everyone. So even the lobby that got the tax break now has a higher tax rate, along with everyone else.

However, if we raised tax rates high enough to pay for the $1.4 trillion of them that are given out each year, the American people would revolt. So tax rates are raised to a barely tolerable level, and then the rest is borrowed.

And that is how we got to $19 trillion in debt and a 39.1% corporate tax rate.

As I have explained many times, if you get rid of all these government gifts to all these special interests, you could substantially lower tax rates. And you get the extra bonus of everyone being on a level playing field. Entities which earn identical incomes would pay identical taxes.

Instead, we have an insane system where entities which earn identical incomes pay radically different taxes.

Enter the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Kevin Brady. This committee came up with a plan to do just what I have been saying for years. They came up with a plan to lower the corporate tax rate substantially by getting rid of all those government giveaways.

Their original plan was simple. Get rid of all the special interest deductions, credits, and exemptions.

Guess what? Those special interests are so powerful that this turned out to be impossible. Our Congress is now completely owned, boys and girls, and it is long past time to wake the fuck up to this fact.

You simply must wake up. Anyone who defends $1.4 trillion of thievery is on the wrong side, and yet we are burdened with pseudocons who do just that. They defend deductions, credits, and exemptions which add up to $1.4 trillion like they are welfare queens.

They have been fed a lie that these tax expenditures mean they get to keep more of their own money. This is a giant lie. A YUGE lie.

As it happened, every time the House Ways and Means committee tried to take away all those special interest tax breaks, the special interests forced them back in. Which then forced the House Ways and Means to raise tax rates back to 39.1%.

Impasse.

So House Ways and Means came up with Plan B: The border adjustment tax. It’s real name is a “destination-based cash flow tax”, but the colloquial term is border adjustment tax.

The border adjustment tax is, very basically, an import tax. Even better, it’s a consumption tax. The corporate tax is a tax on production.

All of our allies have a border adjustment tax. We don’t. We’ve been living on that unlevel playing field forever. Now that House Ways and Means introduced the idea of the US moving to one, our allies are screaming at how unfair it would be for us to have the same kind of import tax they do!

Go figure.

We can get into the pluses and minuses of a border adjustment tax a little later. But for now, here’s how the GOP plan was going to work.

Since the special interests refused to give up their special tax breaks, the GOP decided to leave them in.

Since the special interests want their cake and to eat it, too, they also got the corporate tax rate lowered. To somewhere around 15%.

Because of this, all the lost revenue due to the tax breaks was no longer made up for by the 39.1% tax rate. So House Ways and Means intended to make up the lost revenues with the Border Adjustment Tax.

Enter Trump.

Donald Trump was “ambivalent”, at best, about the Border Adjustment Tax. And now he has decided he is against it.

So bye-bye Border Adjustment Tax.


But…he is keeping the lower corporate tax rate AND all those special interest tax breaks. And that means, boys and girls, a gigantic spurt in national debt if the Trump way comes to pass.


This is a total cop-out. It is the coward’s way out, and every fiscal conservative should be vehemently opposed to this.

 

[g5000]

I want you to watch the video at the top of this link: No tax reform without border adjustment tax, Rep. Nunes says

Pay special attention to the last 30 seconds. Watch every second of the video, but especially pay attention to what Congressman Nunes says in the last 30 seconds.

And then watch the video again, knowing the context of what Nunes says in the last 30 seconds.

Nunes is right. Absolutely right.

 

[Rustic]

As I have explained many times, every time you give a special interest a tax break, someone else has to make up the difference. This is achieved by raising tax rates on everyone. So even the lobby that got the tax break now has a higher tax rate, along with everyone else.

However, if we raised tax rates high enough to pay for the $1.4 trillion of them that are given out each year, the American people would revolt. So tax rates are raised to a barely tolerable level, and then the rest is borrowed.

And that is how we got to $19 trillion in debt and a 39.1% corporate tax rate.

As I have explained many times, if you get rid of all these government gifts to all these special interests, you could substantially lower tax rates. And you get the extra bonus of everyone being on a level playing field. Entities which earn identical incomes would pay identical taxes.

Instead, we have an insane system where entities which earn identical incomes pay radically different taxes.

Enter the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Kevin Brady. This committee came up with a plan to do just what I have been saying for years. They came up with a plan to lower the corporate tax rate substantially by getting rid of all those government giveaways.

Their original plan was simple. Get rid of all the special interest deductions, credits, and exemptions.

Guess what? Those special interests are so powerful that this turned out to be impossible. Our Congress is now completely owned, boys and girls, and it is long past time to wake the fuck up to this fact.

You simply must wake up. Anyone who defends $1.4 trillion of thievery is on the wrong side, and yet we are burdened with pseudocons who do just that. They defend deductions, credits, and exemptions which add up to $1.4 trillion.

They have been fed a lie that these tax expenditures mean they get to keep more of their own money. This is a giant lie. A YUGE lie.

As it happened, every time the House Ways and Means committee tried to take away all those special interest tax breaks, the special interests forced them back in. Which then forced the House Ways and Means to raise tax rates back to 39.1%.

Impasse.

So House Ways and Means came up with Plan B: The border adjustment tax. It’s real name is a “destination-based cash flow tax”, but the colloquial term is border adjustment tax.

The border adjustment tax is, very basically, an import tax. Even better, it’s a consumption tax. The corporate tax is a tax on production.

All of our allies have a border adjustment tax. We don’t. We’ve been living on that unlevel playing field forever. Now that House Ways and Means introduced the idea of the US moving to one, our allies are screaming at how unfair it would be for us to have the same kind of import tax they do!

Go figure.

We can get into the pluses and minuses of a border adjustment tax a little later. But for now, here’s how the GOP plan was going to work.

Since the special interests refused to give up their special tax breaks, the GOP decided to leave them in.

Since the special interests want their cake and to eat it, too, they also got the corporate tax rate lowered. To somewhere around 15%.

Because of this, all the lost revenue due to the tax breaks was no longer made up for by the 39.1% tax rate. So House Ways and Means intended to make up the lost revenues with the Border Adjustment Tax.

Enter Trump.

Donald Trump was “ambivalent”, at best, about the Border Adjustment Tax. And now he has decided he is against it.

So bye-bye Border Adjustment Tax.


But…he is keeping the lower corporate tax rate AND all those special interest tax breaks. And that means, boys and girls, a gigantic spurt in national debt if the Trump way comes to pass.


This is a total cop-out. It is the coward’s way out, and every fiscal conservative should be vehemently opposed to this.

An insanely high corporate tax rate that we happen to have now, along with the stupidity of capital gains tax makes for a weak economy… Fact

 

[BlindBoo]

You can get rid of all the special interest tax breaks except the ones that affect me. </sarcasm>

 

[g5000]

"If people wanted to drop the corporate rate from 35 to say 33, 32, maybe 30, we could probably do it. But if you go back to several years that we looked at doing just that, the goal was to get to 25 percent, and by the time every lobbyist, every special interest group in town, representing every major corporation in this country, the tax rate was automatically all the way back above 30 by the time you put everybody's special loophole in."

 

[LordBrownTrout]

As I have explained many times, every time you give a special interest a tax break, someone else has to make up the difference. This is achieved by raising tax rates on everyone. So even the lobby that got the tax break now has a higher tax rate, along with everyone else.

However, if we raised tax rates high enough to pay for the $1.4 trillion of them that are given out each year, the American people would revolt. So tax rates are raised to a barely tolerable level, and then the rest is borrowed.

And that is how we got to $19 trillion in debt and a 39.1% corporate tax rate.

As I have explained many times, if you get rid of all these government gifts to all these special interests, you could substantially lower tax rates. And you get the extra bonus of everyone being on a level playing field. Entities which earn identical incomes would pay identical taxes.

Instead, we have an insane system where entities which earn identical incomes pay radically different taxes.

Enter the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Kevin Brady. This committee came up with a plan to do just what I have been saying for years. They came up with a plan to lower the corporate tax rate substantially by getting rid of all those government giveaways.

Their original plan was simple. Get rid of all the special interest deductions, credits, and exemptions.

Guess what? Those special interests are so powerful that this turned out to be impossible. Our Congress is now completely owned, boys and girls, and it is long past time to wake the fuck up to this fact.

You simply must wake up. Anyone who defends $1.4 trillion of thievery is on the wrong side, and yet we are burdened with pseudocons who do just that. They defend deductions, credits, and exemptions which add up to $1.4 trillion like they are welfare queens.

They have been fed a lie that these tax expenditures mean they get to keep more of their own money. This is a giant lie. A YUGE lie.

As it happened, every time the House Ways and Means committee tried to take away all those special interest tax breaks, the special interests forced them back in. Which then forced the House Ways and Means to raise tax rates back to 39.1%.

Impasse.

So House Ways and Means came up with Plan B: The border adjustment tax. It’s real name is a “destination-based cash flow tax”, but the colloquial term is border adjustment tax.

The border adjustment tax is, very basically, an import tax. Even better, it’s a consumption tax. The corporate tax is a tax on production.

All of our allies have a border adjustment tax. We don’t. We’ve been living on that unlevel playing field forever. Now that House Ways and Means introduced the idea of the US moving to one, our allies are screaming at how unfair it would be for us to have the same kind of import tax they do!

Go figure.

We can get into the pluses and minuses of a border adjustment tax a little later. But for now, here’s how the GOP plan was going to work.

Since the special interests refused to give up their special tax breaks, the GOP decided to leave them in.

Since the special interests want their cake and to eat it, too, they also got the corporate tax rate lowered. To somewhere around 15%.

Because of this, all the lost revenue due to the tax breaks was no longer made up for by the 39.1% tax rate. So House Ways and Means intended to make up the lost revenues with the Border Adjustment Tax.

Enter Trump.

Donald Trump was “ambivalent”, at best, about the Border Adjustment Tax. And now he has decided he is against it.

So bye-bye Border Adjustment Tax.


But…he is keeping the lower corporate tax rate AND all those special interest tax breaks. And that means, boys and girls, a gigantic spurt in national debt if the Trump way comes to pass.


This is a total cop-out. It is the coward’s way out, and every fiscal conservative should be vehemently opposed to this.

Whats your plan, G?

 

[g5000]

As I have explained many times, every time you give a special interest a tax break, someone else has to make up the difference. This is achieved by raising tax rates on everyone. So even the lobby that got the tax break now has a higher tax rate, along with everyone else.

However, if we raised tax rates high enough to pay for the $1.4 trillion of them that are given out each year, the American people would revolt. So tax rates are raised to a barely tolerable level, and then the rest is borrowed.

And that is how we got to $19 trillion in debt and a 39.1% corporate tax rate.

As I have explained many times, if you get rid of all these government gifts to all these special interests, you could substantially lower tax rates. And you get the extra bonus of everyone being on a level playing field. Entities which earn identical incomes would pay identical taxes.

Instead, we have an insane system where entities which earn identical incomes pay radically different taxes.

Enter the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Kevin Brady. This committee came up with a plan to do just what I have been saying for years. They came up with a plan to lower the corporate tax rate substantially by getting rid of all those government giveaways.

Their original plan was simple. Get rid of all the special interest deductions, credits, and exemptions.

Guess what? Those special interests are so powerful that this turned out to be impossible. Our Congress is now completely owned, boys and girls, and it is long past time to wake the fuck up to this fact.

You simply must wake up. Anyone who defends $1.4 trillion of thievery is on the wrong side, and yet we are burdened with pseudocons who do just that. They defend deductions, credits, and exemptions which add up to $1.4 trillion.

They have been fed a lie that these tax expenditures mean they get to keep more of their own money. This is a giant lie. A YUGE lie.

As it happened, every time the House Ways and Means committee tried to take away all those special interest tax breaks, the special interests forced them back in. Which then forced the House Ways and Means to raise tax rates back to 39.1%.

Impasse.

So House Ways and Means came up with Plan B: The border adjustment tax. It’s real name is a “destination-based cash flow tax”, but the colloquial term is border adjustment tax.

The border adjustment tax is, very basically, an import tax. Even better, it’s a consumption tax. The corporate tax is a tax on production.

All of our allies have a border adjustment tax. We don’t. We’ve been living on that unlevel playing field forever. Now that House Ways and Means introduced the idea of the US moving to one, our allies are screaming at how unfair it would be for us to have the same kind of import tax they do!

Go figure.

We can get into the pluses and minuses of a border adjustment tax a little later. But for now, here’s how the GOP plan was going to work.

Since the special interests refused to give up their special tax breaks, the GOP decided to leave them in.

Since the special interests want their cake and to eat it, too, they also got the corporate tax rate lowered. To somewhere around 15%.

Because of this, all the lost revenue due to the tax breaks was no longer made up for by the 39.1% tax rate. So House Ways and Means intended to make up the lost revenues with the Border Adjustment Tax.

Enter Trump.

Donald Trump was “ambivalent”, at best, about the Border Adjustment Tax. And now he has decided he is against it.

So bye-bye Border Adjustment Tax.


But…he is keeping the lower corporate tax rate AND all those special interest tax breaks. And that means, boys and girls, a gigantic spurt in national debt if the Trump way comes to pass.


This is a total cop-out. It is the coward’s way out, and every fiscal conservative should be vehemently opposed to this.

An insanely high corporate tax rate that we happen to have now, along with the stupidity of capital gains tax makes for a weak economy… Fact

The reason we have the high corporate tax rate is because of tax expenditures, as I've been trying to explain to you pseudocons for YEARS.

 

[g5000]

As I have explained many times, every time you give a special interest a tax break, someone else has to make up the difference. This is achieved by raising tax rates on everyone. So even the lobby that got the tax break now has a higher tax rate, along with everyone else.

However, if we raised tax rates high enough to pay for the $1.4 trillion of them that are given out each year, the American people would revolt. So tax rates are raised to a barely tolerable level, and then the rest is borrowed.

And that is how we got to $19 trillion in debt and a 39.1% corporate tax rate.

As I have explained many times, if you get rid of all these government gifts to all these special interests, you could substantially lower tax rates. And you get the extra bonus of everyone being on a level playing field. Entities which earn identical incomes would pay identical taxes.

Instead, we have an insane system where entities which earn identical incomes pay radically different taxes.

Enter the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Kevin Brady. This committee came up with a plan to do just what I have been saying for years. They came up with a plan to lower the corporate tax rate substantially by getting rid of all those government giveaways.

Their original plan was simple. Get rid of all the special interest deductions, credits, and exemptions.

Guess what? Those special interests are so powerful that this turned out to be impossible. Our Congress is now completely owned, boys and girls, and it is long past time to wake the fuck up to this fact.

You simply must wake up. Anyone who defends $1.4 trillion of thievery is on the wrong side, and yet we are burdened with pseudocons who do just that. They defend deductions, credits, and exemptions which add up to $1.4 trillion like they are welfare queens.

They have been fed a lie that these tax expenditures mean they get to keep more of their own money. This is a giant lie. A YUGE lie.

As it happened, every time the House Ways and Means committee tried to take away all those special interest tax breaks, the special interests forced them back in. Which then forced the House Ways and Means to raise tax rates back to 39.1%.

Impasse.

So House Ways and Means came up with Plan B: The border adjustment tax. It’s real name is a “destination-based cash flow tax”, but the colloquial term is border adjustment tax.

The border adjustment tax is, very basically, an import tax. Even better, it’s a consumption tax. The corporate tax is a tax on production.

All of our allies have a border adjustment tax. We don’t. We’ve been living on that unlevel playing field forever. Now that House Ways and Means introduced the idea of the US moving to one, our allies are screaming at how unfair it would be for us to have the same kind of import tax they do!

Go figure.

We can get into the pluses and minuses of a border adjustment tax a little later. But for now, here’s how the GOP plan was going to work.

Since the special interests refused to give up their special tax breaks, the GOP decided to leave them in.

Since the special interests want their cake and to eat it, too, they also got the corporate tax rate lowered. To somewhere around 15%.

Because of this, all the lost revenue due to the tax breaks was no longer made up for by the 39.1% tax rate. So House Ways and Means intended to make up the lost revenues with the Border Adjustment Tax.

Enter Trump.

Donald Trump was “ambivalent”, at best, about the Border Adjustment Tax. And now he has decided he is against it.

So bye-bye Border Adjustment Tax.


But…he is keeping the lower corporate tax rate AND all those special interest tax breaks. And that means, boys and girls, a gigantic spurt in national debt if the Trump way comes to pass.


This is a total cop-out. It is the coward’s way out, and every fiscal conservative should be vehemently opposed to this.

Whats your plan, G?

I've explained my plan a zillion times on this forum. It's very simple.

Ban tax expenditures.

Our tax rates are as high as they are because the government gives away $1.4 trillion in tax expenditures every year. This is the single biggest cause of our debt and our high tax rates. They add up to literally twice what the government gives away in welfare, which is exactly why I compare the defenders of tax expenditures to welfare queens.

You have been lied to. You have been fooled into bleeving your tax deductions mean "I get to keep more of my own money". The fact is, that deduction comes out of someone else's pocket. And it even comes out of your own pocket because you are also paying higher tax rates.

Even worse, the Mortgage Interest Deduction raises the price of houses. So more money from your pocket, transferred by the government up the food chain to mortgage brokers, home builders, and realtors. That wealth distribution scheme alone takes $80 billion a year from the pockets of home owners. People who have been utterly misled into believing the MID is putting money back in their pocket!

Every tax deduction, every tax exemption, every tax credit has to be made up for. It's basic math, and yet it escapes the understanding of pseudocons.

As you can hear from Congressman Nunes, every tax break forced them to raise the corporate tax rate that much more. It's a very simple relationship, and yet totally escapes the rube herd's grasp.

 

[bendog]

You can get rid of all the special interest tax breaks except the ones that affect me. </sarcasm>

Well, that's the thing. We could leave in place both the mortgage interest deduction (with caps on how much the mortgage is) and tax breaks to employers providing workers's HC benefits. That has the disadvantage of treating taxpayers differently, but the idea is to pass something that makes it better.

In exchange for giving up the tax breaks, corporations could see their tax rate lowered in a revenue neutral way.

Also, the CBO or someone could score how much we need to tax profits kept overseas, to make it about equal for a corp to bring them back here and face taxes.

And, as G5000 is suggesting, a border adjustment tax would allow for some further corp tax rate deduction.

I don't agree with 5000 if he's saying we need to go completely to consumption (rather than earning) tax because that is a regressive move. Instead we could lower the corp rate even further by taxing cap gains at a higher rate.

OF COURSE ALL THIS IS HYPOTHETICAL NOW BECAUSE TRUMP WANTS A WINNER. He could not care less about deficits so long as he gets 'real tax reform passed that lowers rates."

 

[g5000]

In exchange for giving up the tax breaks, corporations could see their tax rate lowered in a revenue neutral way.

Bingo. You got it. Exactly.

But as Nunes explains, the corporations REFUSED to go along with it. Game theory is very much at work here, except it is destroying our country.

And since Trump is not going to allow the BAT, our deficits will climb even higher if the corporate tax rate is lowered without taking away the tax breaks or adding the border adjustment tax.

 

[g5000]

I don't agree with 5000 if he's saying we need to go completely to consumption (rather than earning) tax because that is a regressive move.

Our current tax expenditure scheme is massively regressive.

Consumption taxes are superior for many reasons. I like them mostly because they cause everyone to have skin in the game, and they make it much more difficult to hide a tax increase.

The regressive nature of consumption taxes can be compensated with rebates, or prebates.

 

[g5000]

Here's the thing.

We should probably go with a VAT instead of a BAT.

We probably will get a VAT, sooner or later. And if so, we better do it sooner. Because if the GOP creates a VAT, they will reduce taxes elsewhere. If we sit on our fucking thumbs and do nothing, the Democrats will create a VAT and they will NOT reduce taxes elsewhere.

The best course would be to get rid of tax expenditures, and lower tax rates. Then we wouldn't even need a VAT. We'd have so much surplus we wouldn't know what to do with it.

It is so fucking simple, even a morbidly obese New York Democrat limousine liberal can figure it out.

 

[Rustic]

I don't agree with 5000 if he's saying we need to go completely to consumption (rather than earning) tax because that is a regressive move.

Our current tax expenditure scheme is massively regressive.

Consumption taxes are superior for many reasons. I like them mostly because they cause everyone to have skin in the game, and they make it much more difficult to hide a tax increase.

The regressive nature of consumption taxes can be compensated with rebates, or prebates.

A Consumption tax of some sort is far superior to a tax on progress(income), because right now deadbeats, drug dealers and the like pay no taxes whatsoever.

 

[g5000]

I don't agree with 5000 if he's saying we need to go completely to consumption (rather than earning) tax because that is a regressive move.

Our current tax expenditure scheme is massively regressive.

Consumption taxes are superior for many reasons. I like them mostly because they cause everyone to have skin in the game, and they make it much more difficult to hide a tax increase.

The regressive nature of consumption taxes can be compensated with rebates, or prebates.

A Consumption tax of some sort is far superior to a tax on progress(income), because right now deadbeats, drug dealers and the like pay no taxes whatsoever.

I'm a big fan of consumption taxes, as I said.

 

[BlindBoo]

You can get rid of all the special interest tax breaks except the ones that affect me. </sarcasm>

Well, that's the thing. We could leave in place both the mortgage interest deduction (with caps on how much the mortgage is) and tax breaks to employers providing workers's HC benefits. That has the disadvantage of treating taxpayers differently, but the idea is to pass something that makes it better.

In exchange for giving up the tax breaks, corporations could see their tax rate lowered in a revenue neutral way.

Also, the CBO or someone could score how much we need to tax profits kept overseas, to make it about equal for a corp to bring them back here and face taxes.

And, as G5000 is suggesting, a border adjustment tax would allow for some further corp tax rate deduction.

I don't agree with 5000 if he's saying we need to go completely to consumption (rather than earning) tax because that is a regressive move. Instead we could lower the corp rate even further by taxing cap gains at a higher rate.

OF COURSE ALL THIS IS HYPOTHETICAL NOW BECAUSE TRUMP WANTS A WINNER. He could not care less about deficits so long as he gets 'real tax reform passed that lowers rates."

Oh I agree completely and I would love to see tax reform of this type.

I have low expectations of my fellow Americans to sacrifice their money saving(damn sarcasm again) deductions, I guess.

 

[g5000]

Here is the GOP corporate tax plan published last year: https://abetterway.speaker.gov/_assets/pdf/ABetterWay-Tax-PolicyPaper.pdf

Here are some articles about the border adjustment tax you may find useful to get up to speed on:

Donald Trump Warns on House Republican Tax Plan
No Need to Fear the Border-Adjustment Tax
Why buying a corporate jet pays for itself
This is the Republican plot to kill the US corporate income tax as we know it
Liberals Already Calling For Higher Rates On The Border Adjusted Tax
No tax reform without border adjustment tax, Rep. Nunes says

 

[Rustic]

You can get rid of all the special interest tax breaks except the ones that affect me. </sarcasm>

Well, that's the thing. We could leave in place both the mortgage interest deduction (with caps on how much the mortgage is) and tax breaks to employers providing workers's HC benefits. That has the disadvantage of treating taxpayers differently, but the idea is to pass something that makes it better.

In exchange for giving up the tax breaks, corporations could see their tax rate lowered in a revenue neutral way.

Also, the CBO or someone could score how much we need to tax profits kept overseas, to make it about equal for a corp to bring them back here and face taxes.

And, as G5000 is suggesting, a border adjustment tax would allow for some further corp tax rate deduction.

I don't agree with 5000 if he's saying we need to go completely to consumption (rather than earning) tax because that is a regressive move. Instead we could lower the corp rate even further by taxing cap gains at a higher rate.

OF COURSE ALL THIS IS HYPOTHETICAL NOW BECAUSE TRUMP WANTS A WINNER. He could not care less about deficits so long as he gets 'real tax reform passed that lowers rates."

Oh I agree completely and I would love to see tax reform of this type.

I have low expectations of my fellow Americans to sacrifice their money saving(damn sarcasm again) deductions, I guess.

Right now I have three years of extensions on my income tax so my accountant can find ways to save as much money as possible. Of course I only do that in principal, I pay far more for my accountant fees then I do in taxes.

 

[g5000]

I have low expectations of my fellow Americans to sacrifice their money saving(damn sarcasm again) deductions, I guess.

The American people have been seriously misled. The thing about the present day Republican Party (post year 2000) is their abdication of the moral high ground, their utter failure to make the case for fiscal conservatism. REAL fiscal conservatism.

Instead, they became spineless populists. The most cowardly partisan hacks who have ever walked the Earth.

If the Right grew a fucking spine and some brain cells, it would be a very SIMPLE matter to educate the American people on this course.

Unfortunately, the liars have created a situation where the American people see anyone who wants to eliminate tax expenditures as a THREAT to be shot on sight.

Incredible.

 

[Rustic]

I have low expectations of my fellow Americans to sacrifice their money saving(damn sarcasm again) deductions, I guess.

The American people have been seriously misled. The thing about the present day Republican Party (post year 2000) is their abdication of the moral high ground, their utter failure to make the case for fiscal conservatism. REAL fiscal conservatism.

Instead, they became spineless populists. The most cowardly partisan hacks who have ever walked the Earth.

If the Right grew a fucking spine and some brain cells, it would be a very SIMPLE matter to educate the American people on this course.

The GOP establishment are not conservatives, they are progressives that call themselves Republicans…

 

[g5000]

You can get rid of all the special interest tax breaks except the ones that affect me. </sarcasm>

Well, that's the thing. We could leave in place both the mortgage interest deduction (with caps on how much the mortgage is) and tax breaks to employers providing workers's HC benefits. That has the disadvantage of treating taxpayers differently, but the idea is to pass something that makes it better.

In exchange for giving up the tax breaks, corporations could see their tax rate lowered in a revenue neutral way.

Also, the CBO or someone could score how much we need to tax profits kept overseas, to make it about equal for a corp to bring them back here and face taxes.

And, as G5000 is suggesting, a border adjustment tax would allow for some further corp tax rate deduction.

I don't agree with 5000 if he's saying we need to go completely to consumption (rather than earning) tax because that is a regressive move. Instead we could lower the corp rate even further by taxing cap gains at a higher rate.

OF COURSE ALL THIS IS HYPOTHETICAL NOW BECAUSE TRUMP WANTS A WINNER. He could not care less about deficits so long as he gets 'real tax reform passed that lowers rates."

Oh I agree completely and I would love to see tax reform of this type.

I have low expectations of my fellow Americans to sacrifice their money saving(damn sarcasm again) deductions, I guess.

Right now I have three years of extensions on my income tax so my accountant can find ways to save as much money as possible. Of course I only do that in principal, I pay far more for my accountant fees then I do in taxes.

If there were no tax expenditures, you could fill out your taxes in five minutes, on a postcard. And you would be paying a much lower tax rate. You would not even need an accountant.

Accountants hate the very idea of that. They lobby to keep your taxes as complicated as possible.