Senate Passes Tax Reform...The Donald Wins Again!

[ChesBayJJ]

The Donald wins yet again!!!

Wins what? other than the election, he hasn't won anything. The bill has a long way to go.

 

[eddiew37]

What will trump say when sitting across the desk an FBI agent asks him How did you know Flynn lied to the FBI??

 

[depotoo]

You reduce their tax rate by 15% and you think it won’t make a difference?

Republicans are making some heady claims about their hastily constructed, historically unpopular tax legislation. “If we do this, then America will win again like never, ever before,” President Trump said in a speech touting the legislation this week. “A vote to cut taxes is a vote to put America first again. We want to do that. We want to put America first again. It’s time to take care of our workers, to protect our communities, and to rebuild our great country.”

But a bipartisan group of leading economists have expressed some deep skepticism about many of the central claims the White House and congressional Republicans are making about the potential effects of the legislation. Below are the top seven myths they have put forward—and the evidence that disproves them.

1. The tax bill will pay for itself.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act remains a moving target, with congressional Republicans horse-trading different provisions into and out of the bill and work not yet done to reconcile differences between the House and the Senate versions. Still, the basic parameters are clear. On the household side, the bill would lower the rates charged in each tax bracket, expand the child tax credit, eliminate personal exemptions, and expand the standard deduction. On the business side, it would lower the corporate income tax rate dramatically, and create a big deduction or a special rate for “pass-through” businesses that pay individual income tax rates. It would also let businesses bring back foreign profits at a very low rate, and likely move the country to a territorial tax system, wherein companies pay taxes on profits generated in the United States, not worldwide.

All those rate reductions would mean that the Treasury would be taking in far less money from individuals and businesses. But Republican officials have insisted that the tax cuts would improve growth so much that they would pay for themselves, offsetting the revenue losses. “Not only will this tax plan pay for itself, but it will pay down debt,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin promisedrecently.

Not so, one of the country’s most respected, nonpolitical economic scorekeepers has said. The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) this week found that the Senate proposal would increase output by 0.8 percent over ten years. Because that extra output would get taxed like anything else, it would indeed mean additional money going to government coffers—but not nearly enough to cover the losses from the tax cuts. The JCT estimated that the bill would add $1.4 trillion dollars to federal deficits over a decade, ignoring any dynamic effects on the economy. Taking into account improved growth, it would add $1 trillion to federal deficits—more than President Obama’s stimulus bill, passed to save the economy during the Great Recession. A University of Chicago poll of some of the country’s top economists came to the same conclusion. Not a single one of the experts surveyed said that the kind of legislation under consideration would lead to a falling debt-to-GDP ratio.

2. It will supercharge growth.

Still, Republicans have insisted that the legislation would supercharge American growth. “These massive tax cuts will be rocket fuel—Little Rocket Man—rocket fuel for the American economy,” Trump said this week, referencing Kim Jong Un of North Korea. “Remember I used to say, we can hit 4 [percent growth] and we can hit 3? And they were all saying, forget it, forget it. It was 1.2. It was doing terribly. We were flat. We were even. In all fairness, the stock market was going this way. And now, we’re hitting numbers that nobody thought possible.”
There are 5 more but I don't want to bore any of you
But the JCT shows that the tax bill would add less than 0.1 percentage points to the country’s annual rate of growth, totaling just 0.8 percentage points of additional growth over ten years. The experts quoted in that Chicago poll said much the same. “Tax policy appears to have little effect at the margin on GDP growth in OECD countries,” argued David Autor, a Harvard economist.

Why doesn’t the bill do more for the economy’s growth rate? In part because the government is passing tax cuts when the economy is already doing well—raising the prospect that the Federal Reserve would move to counteract the stimulative effect of all that deficit spending and would raise interest rates to cool the economy off. And in part because giving tax cuts to rich families and corporations is simply not that stimulative of a thing to do, since they do not tend to put the money toward buying new goods and services.

3. Cutting the corporate tax rate will lead businesses to give raises to regular workers.

 

[depotoo]

What will trump say when sitting across the desk an FBI agent asks him How did you know Flynn lied to the FBI??

You are incorrigible.

 

[eddiew37]

What will trump say when sitting across the desk an FBI agent asks him How did you know Flynn lied to the FBI??

You are incorrigible.

I'm an ex republican voted for gwb in 2000 ,,,cut off my voting arm soon after They call me lefty now

 

[eddiew37]

What will trump say when sitting across the desk an FBI agent asks him How did you know Flynn lied to the FBI??

You are incorrigible.

I'm an ex republican voted for gwb in 2000 ,,,cut off my voting arm soon after They call me lefty now

Remember Trump fired Comey because he wouldn't protect Flynn

What will trump say when sitting across the desk an FBI agent asks him How did you know Flynn lied to the FBI??

You are incorrigible.

I'm an ex republican voted for gwb in 2000 ,,,cut off my voting arm soon after They call me lefty now

Jillian posted this
Retired judge and Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano says Michael Flynn’s guilty plea is a “nightmare” for President Trump.

“I think this is probably the tip of a prosecutorial iceberg, so to speak,” Napolitano said Friday on Fox News. “It is a nightmare for Donald Trump"

 

[depotoo]

That’s not what I heard. Here is Fox article on what he said.
Judge Napolitano Believes Mueller's Team Will Interview President Trump
.

What will trump say when sitting across the desk an FBI agent asks him How did you know Flynn lied to the FBI??

You are incorrigible.

I'm an ex republican voted for gwb in 2000 ,,,cut off my voting arm soon after They call me lefty now

Remember Trump fired Comey because he wouldn't protect Flynn

What will trump say when sitting across the desk an FBI agent asks him How did you know Flynn lied to the FBI??

You are incorrigible.

I'm an ex republican voted for gwb in 2000 ,,,cut off my voting arm soon after They call me lefty now

Jillian posted this
Retired judge and Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano says Michael Flynn’s guilty plea is a “nightmare” for President Trump.

“I think this is probably the tip of a prosecutorial iceberg, so to speak,” Napolitano said Friday on Fox News. “It is a nightmare for Donald Trump"

 

[Harpy Eagle]

What will trump say when sitting across the desk an FBI agent asks him How did you know Flynn lied to the FBI??

You are incorrigible.

I'm an ex republican voted for gwb in 2000 ,,,cut off my voting arm soon after They call me lefty now

I am an ex-Repub as well, but I left prior to 2000. The last Repub I voted for was Bush I the first time. That was the second to last time I voted for either of the two major party candidates in any presidential election.

 

[PredFan]

The country wins again.

yes, true.....I am sure that Russia (or maybe China) are very, very happy.....LOL

(did you know that China may be the one where right wingers in congress need to go to borrow that $1.4 TRILLION to cover the deficit under this tax scam???)

Ha ha, you aren’t just a loser and a liar, but you are an immature loser and liar.

 

[eddiew37]

The country wins again.

yes, true.....I am sure that Russia (or maybe China) are very, very happy.....LOL

(did you know that China may be the one where right wingers in congress need to go to borrow that $1.4 TRILLION to cover the deficit under this tax scam???)

Ha ha, you aren’t just a loser and a liar, but you are an immature loser and liar.

Thanks to syntholholic
What a dumbass! His dementia makes it impossible for him to remember what he has previously stated.

Trump Tweets He Knew Flynn Lied to FBI When He Asked Comey to ‘Let Flynn Go’


I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2017


Whether the president remembered it or not, he has never before stated that Flynn lied to the FBI. Whether the president realized it or not, conceding that he knew about Flynn’s FBI lie – to which Flynn pleaded guilty on Friday – opens Trump up to a world of legal hurt. Trump had asked James Comey, the former director of the FBI, to drop an inquiry into a man Trump now says he knew lied to the bureau.

“This tweet makes it clear that Trump knew at the time that he made his request to Comey to let the investigation go that Flynn had lied to the FBI, which is a criminal offense,” Barbara McQuade, who until January served as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, told The Daily Beast.

Trump’s original explanation for firing Flynn on the evening of February 13 was that Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his December conversations with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak concerning new U.S. sanctions on Russia. On February 14, then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump fired Flynn for what Spicer called an “evolving and eroding level of trust” with Flynn.

That same day, Trump met with several national security officials, including Comey, and dismissed the others to talk with Comey in private. Comey at the time was in charge of the Russia inquiry.

“I want to talk about Mike Flynn,” Trump told him, according to Comey’s sworn Senate testimony in June. “The President began by saying Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the Vice President.” (If Trump told Comey that Flynn lied to the FBI, Comey did not include that in his highly anticipated testimony.)

RELATED IN POLITICS

Michael Flynn Just Flipped on Team Trump

‘Very Senior’ Trump Official Authorized Flynn’s Russia Chats

Flynn Knew the FBI Heard His Russia Calls. Why’d He Lie?
Trump quickly got to the point of the one-on-one discussion.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Comey quoted Trump saying. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Comey said he promised Trump nothing, and considered Trump’s request such a breach of FBI independence from the White House that he prepared a memo on it – a subpoenable document, in other words – that he shared with his FBI leadership team and not Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Less than three months after that meeting, Trump fired Comey, citing the Russia investigation as the cause to NBC’s Lester Holt, which itself was a revision from the initial White House excuse that Comey had mistreated Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s tweet “adds to the evidence that Trump was attempting to obstruct or impede the investigation of a crime,” said McQuade, the former federal prosecutor.

GET THE BEAST IN YOUR INBOX!
The admission from the president also suggests that White House counsel Don McGahn had informed the president about Flynn’s potential to “be blackmailed by the Russians,” as Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general, put it in May testimony.

Yet according to the timeline Yates provided of briefing McGahn, Trump kept in office for another 18 days a man he now says he knew lied to the FBI – deepening Flynn’s compromise, and even potentially Trump’s, should the Russians have come to know Trump was sticking with Flynn.

“Trump had asked James Comey, the former director of the FBI, to drop an inquiry into a man Trump now says he knew lied to the bureau.”
Flynn lied to the FBI in an interview on January 24. Yates testified that on the morning of January 26, she called McGahn with “a very sensitive matter” she needed to discuss with the White House counsel in person. That day and the next, Yates told McGahn that Flynn was in a “compromise situation” owing to Pence’s untrue public presentation of Flynn’s conversations with Russian ambassador Kislyak.

In her public testimony, Yates was careful not to discuss two pieces of classified information. First, U.S. intelligence had intercepted the Flynn-Kislyak conversations – legally, since Kislyak was an agent of a foreign power; as the other party on the call, Flynn was collected “incidentally,” in surveillance parlance – thereby disproving Pence’s public account of the calls. Second, Flynn had just given the FBI what Flynn has now conceded was an untruthful account of the Kislyak conversation.

But without saying Flynn had lied to the FBI, Yates made it nonetheless clear that Flynn’s FBI interview was significant enough to prompt her urgent White House visit. (After all, Pence’s TV appearance was on January 15, 11 days prior.) Yates said she had “notes that described that interview” that she took to her parley with McGahn, along with a senior Justice Department national-security official in contact with the FBI. As well, Yates recalled that during a follow-up meeting on January 27, McGahn asked her about “the applicability of certain statutes, certain criminal statutes” to Flynn.

Yates said she was not in a position to know what McGahn did with the “urgent” information on Flynn that she gave to him. She did not hear from the White House counsel again until January 30, she testified: “I don't know what happened after that because that was my last day with DOJ” – when Trump fired her, ostensibly for her refusal to defend Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban in court. Mueller interviewed McGahn last week, the Washington Postconfirmed.

Flynn’s agreement to cooperate has substantially deepened the White House’s exposure to Mueller’s probe. There are not many administration officials senior to Flynn against whom Mueller would want him to testify. While Mueller has never confirmed that Trump himself is under investigation, Trump is on that short list.

Also there are Trump’s son-in-law and Pence himself, all of whom were senior transition-team officials at the time of the Kislyak calls. Pence, who has evaded suspicion in the Russia probe until now, ran the transition. Flynn’s agreed stipulation of the facts of the Kislyak calls claims they occurred with the full knowledge, and in one case at the direction, of the transition team.

As well, Flynn’s decision to seek a plea caused Trump to privately seethe weeks in advance, The Daily Beast reported Friday. Long before Flynn ever says Trump’s name on a witness stand, the plea deal appears to have prompted Trump to casually and publicly proffer information that could lead Mueller to his doorstep.

 

[Flopper]

The Donald plays to win and did so even with opponents on his team. The Donald is a genius. Get over it you douchebag, snowflakes qu33rs!

The Donald plays to win and did so even with opponents on his team. The Donald is a genius. Get over it you douchebag, snowflakes qu33rs!

The Trump Organization will certainly be a winner. The bill will provide desperately needed relief for billionaires like Trump. Too bad so many middle class Americans will be the loser. Maybe that's why Americans in a recent Quinnipiac poll found 61 percent of Americans saying that the bill would mainly help the rich, while just 24 percent said that it would be best for the middle class. This bill is viewed more negatively than the tax hikes passed under Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. Next year, the GOP is going to have to take credit for it at the polls. They can't blame this on Clinton or Obama.
Republicans Have Written the Least Popular Tax Bill in Modern History

 

[nat4900]

Next year, the GOP is going to have to take credit for it at the polls. They can't blame this on Clinton or Obama.
Republicans Have Written the Least Popular Tax Bill in Modern History

They may be bastards, my friend, but they're "c;ever" bastards.....the tax scam will NOT take effect until AFTER the midterms....They are bargaining for at least one more congressional election cycle without having to face the consequences of this rip-off of the middle class.

 

[jc456]

JC watch your butt
Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and goodwill, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper, and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.

I usually just wipe it when I’m done

 

[dudmuck]

Well, let me explain to you why it's an important victory: because the Senate was the biggest and only obstacle to passing tax reform, since the House already passed tax reform. Now that the Senate has passed it, we are assured of a major, long-overdue reform of our tax code in a way that will encourage capital to return to America and that will encourage our big companies to expand on American soil. Isn't that a good thing?

Do you guys not understand that this tax reform bill, either version, will, according to just about every major business group in America, stimulate hiring and investment and bring capital back to America? I thought you guys were all about helping the middle class? Well, gulp, who the devil do you think most middle-class workers work for? Poor people? Non-small-business businesses employ MILLIONS of middle-income people. Indeed, those people are middle income precisely because they've been lucky enough to get a job with a company that's big enough to pay them middle-income wages plus benefits.

The ones who are helped mostly are the Trumps and his friends and their deductions are permanent The rest of the working class not so Just saw a clip of a 2013 clip where your repub leader said how bad it was to raise deficits What happened?? Seems to me repubs are worried about deficits only when republicans are in the WH This is a TAX SCAM bill

 

[Snouter]

I don't mean to bring this up...but a general question for libtards, did y'all graduate from high school and if so where!

 

[basquebromance]

Did the Democrats all get together and work out a screenplay for how they were going to bash the tax bill? Every single one of them the same! Oh the drama! Once we get them out of Congress, we can send them off to do an episode of survivor together!

 

[Flopper]

Next year, the GOP is going to have to take credit for it at the polls. They can't blame this on Clinton or Obama.
Republicans Have Written the Least Popular Tax Bill in Modern History

They may be bastards, my friend, but they're "c;ever" bastards.....the tax scam will NOT take effect until AFTER the midterms....They are bargaining for at least one more congressional election cycle without having to face the consequences of this rip-off of the middle class.

I think what you're saying is republicans will present the tax bill as the crowning achievement of the legislative session, the engine of job creation, and an economic miracle of our times. Democrats will present it as one of the great hoaxes of all times, republican legislation to benefit the rich at the expense of the middle class and poor.

By next November, the tax bill will not be a major issue for either party. The issue will be Trump and republican support for him. If republicans jump on the Trump bandwagon, on immigration, taunting North Korea into a war, destruction of the environment and the Mueller investigation accuses Trump of obstruction of justice and collusion, the games over.