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We hang it around their necks

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Outsourcing: the 2017 GOP Tax Heist is going to make American jobs disappear even faster than ever:

  • Robots, which will be located...: It allows companies to expense 100% of capital expenditures in the current year (retroactive to 2017, so, CEO’s, get that credit card out). What do you buy when you’re a CEO who wants his financial statements to look as good as possible for the foreseeable future? Robots! Where do you want to locate the fab containing the robots? See the next bullet point (hint: it aint the US)
  • ...not in the US: The new “territorial” (AKA “terror-itorial-ize American workers) tax system will allows companies who generate income outside the US to pay 0% (zero percent) US tax, down from a high of 35%. Wow! That’s a lot of savings! What would this encourage, assuming you are a CEO who wants his financial statements to look as good as possible (so analysts rate your stock as “buy” next quarter, so you get your bonus, and your stock vests, and those vests are worth as much $ as possible, and you don’t feel like a loser the next time you go to Davos in your tax-deductible corporate jet) for the foreseeable future? Yes, that’s right! Outsourcing!

Americans Last: the 2017 GOP Tax Heist is going to reward people with lawyers (them) and penalize normal folks (us). This is going to be the full employment act for tax planners, accountants, and Snidely Whiplash, people. 

Old People: buh-bye, Medicare, buh-bye Social Security, good job keeping that promise, Donald J. Trump. 

The Deficit: The deficit caused by this abomination is going to explode. It’s not going to be 1 trillion. It’s not going to be 1.5 trillion. It’s going to be a whole number multiple of 1.5 trillion (my guess? upwards of 4 trillion). Why? It has not been thought through. Nobody who knows anything about anything actually had any input into this. The loopholes in this thing have loopholes. In case you’re interested (I, sadly, am interested in this kind of thing), here again is the 34-page paper (really, it’s only the starting point) of the critique of the tax bill from a ton of folks who are a lot more perspicacious than I am about tax law: papers.ssrn.com/… Note: if you are not in the higher marginal brackets (i.e. if you don’t make more than $400,000/year), this is not going to help you much. But people who do make that much a) have a lot of money to spend on tax planners, and b) pay a significant percentage of the overall revenue generated from individual taxes. They are all going to be scrambling to get themselves re-organized as corporations, and the IRS, if it ever does catch up to the shenanigans, is going to take years, and years, and YEARS to do so. 

Sick People: Remember how the five people who were hurt by Obamacare each got a full-page spread describing how they now had to pay $260/mo instead of $12/mo for health insurance? how they were so terribly damaged by Obamacare? When the mandate ends, a lot of people who are no longer required to get insurance are are going to stop getting insurance. Some of them are going to get sick. Some of the ones who get sick are going to die horrible, lingering deaths. Some of the people who die are going to be sympathetic. Those people are going to get articles in the paper.  Some may even be kids who stopped getting CHIP at the same time the GOP was giving gazillions of dollars to the children of Sam Walton. The optics on this are going to be terrible. And they are going to go on forever...forever. On NPR the other day Teri Gross had an interview with a transplant surgeon who had a child patient die because the child aged out of insurance, couldn’t afford the immunosuppresants, and died. Multiply this story by infinity.

The 10% of middle class Americans whose taxes will go up immediately: Back to those five people whose insurance costs went up? There are going to be millions...*millions*...of sympathetic people who are really going to struggle to pay taxes as a result of this bill. A lot of them are going to be salt-of-the-earth Real Americans (TM) who have big families (sorry, Mormons). There will be a *lot* of publicity about these people. Corollary: A lot of really wealthy people are going to be doing great. Anybody who writes an article comparing the poor, large, middle-American family screwed by this tax bill with the rich, small, upper 1% family that makes out like a bandit because of this tax bill is going to get a bunch of clicks.  

Recession: There will be a recession. When there is, it will be blamed on the GOP tax bill. 

Just as the Republicans blamed every damn thing on Obamacare, Democrats will get to blame everything that goes wrong for the next decade on this tax bill (much more justifiable, obviously, than the Republican Obamacare smear machine). There are going to be some terrible stories out there. And they’re not going to end. The publicity will be devastating, it will be continuous, and there will be enough variety to keep people interested for a long time. This tax bill is going to be the end of the GOP, assuming it doesn’t kill us all first. 


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