2017 Democratic Thread

[caulfield12]

At any rate, here's an example for Rabbit of a fair/objective/balanced article on Trump that actually looks at both sides instead of attempting to score "gotcha" points. From a Democratic Party perspective, some of these answers are a bit scary, but it's still going to take a lot more than that solid or strongly committed 35-40% of the electorate for Trump to win another term.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/26/politics/we-...-trump-america/

Edited April 28, 2017 by caulfield12

[GoSox05]

If you're going to pull up an article from a half of a decade ago to support your socialist theory you should at least mention the article dated.

 

That 23.8% tax is ~4% more than an individual with a taxable income of $152K (say roughly 160K salary) a year would pay on their ordinary income. There are people who have to invest and save for retirement because they don't get a government taxpayer paid pension or they're not in a teacher's union. 401k's are harder and harder to come by and people have to make their own retirement instead of being handed a pension that is a burden on society. It's messed up that you would use some story about Buffet with no context whatsoever, and seemingly, no understanding of investing, to push your socialist agenda

 

Warren Buffet donates billions and billions of dollars to charity. Every year, he uses the charity deductions to decrease his tax liability. In the past, he has said he'll always use the max deductions (30% or 50%) to decrease his liability, and in turn, his rate. So yeah, because he has donated billions of dollars to noble causes, he pays a lesser rate than his secretary. That's what giving billions of dollars to help others affords you to do.

 

 

Having the rich pay a higher tax rate is not "Socialist theory".

 

 

[Brian]

Would Elizabeth Warren turn down $400K for a speech? GMAB

[caulfield12]

You live in a la-la land where the verdict is decided by left wing think pieces. You bring up Trump in every single post of yours regardless of whether he's relevant or not (usually he's not). I hold far more left wing views than you hold right wing views and I am far more balanced across the political spectrum. All of this is entirely irrelevant and your need to analyze me and mansplain to me is unnecessary and laughable. You don't know anything about taxes and you proved that in this thread. To be fair, I wouldn't either if I was secluded in China. You look at things in isolation because the more granular the conversation gets the more your lack of understanding shows.

 

Yes, Trump's irrelevant to everything going on in the world today. He's certainly more relevant to world security today than fighting Obama like Don Quixote is to Donald Trump.

 

What left wing view do you have, exactly? I'm sure you will refuse to list any.

 

When have you ever cited a politically-balanced article in the last two years?

 

As far as tax policy goes, you've already exposed yourself...especially if you can't even acknowledge the basic issue of capital gains on the top 1% being much lower than rates for the Rust Belt blue collar workers in their 40's and 50's.

 

More laughable is arguing the mundane rehash of the estate tax being indefensible, when, once again, the rich don't pay more than 20% taxes (or anything) compared to regular people who can't afford lawyers to set up tax shelters in the Cayman Islands, Bahamas or Panama. Heck, look no further than Donald Trump as an example of tax avoidance and your supposed "job creation." Republican tax and health care reform policy finally emerges after 8 years and this is the best talking point you can come up with? Jack Kemp looks like Milton Friedman compared to Cohn, Mnuchin, Ross and Peter Navarro.

 

Granular conversations here? Okay, sure. It doesn't require being in Washington or Chicago to understand what's going on the world. Living outside of the US, one can actually discern the big picture and have a more objective reading on world affairs. Once again, would love to see a single example of a granular conversation emerging from a single one of your right wing conspiracy hit pieces against the Clintons and Obama.

 

 

Trump says his tax plan helps the middle class (but it helps the rich a lot, too)

As promised, Trump's tax plan includes cuts for middle and moderate income folks, but the rich and corporations get even more goodies.

 

 

 

"The majority of the benefits go to high-income people," says Joe Rosenberg, a senior research associate at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

 

Tonight, he touted the plan as one for the middle class. www.cnn.com

 

http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/26/news/econo...dex.html?iid=EL

Get rid of the estate tax

The current estate tax only applies to estates over $5.5 million. As such, it only affects about 0.2% of all estates in any given year, according to the Tax Policy Center.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_...1982_-_2010.gif

Edited April 30, 2017 by caulfield12

[caulfield12]

Q: During the Clinton administration was the federal budget balanced? Was the federal deficit erased?

A: Yes to both questions, whether you count Social Security or not.

 

The Clinton years showed the effects of a large tax increase that Clinton pushed through in his first year, and that Republicans incorrectly claim is the "largest tax increase in history." It fell almost exclusively on upper-income taxpayers. Clinton’s fiscal 1994 budget also contained some spending restraints. An equally if not more powerful influence was the booming economy and huge gains in the stock markets, the so-called dot-com bubble, which brought in hundreds of millions in unanticipated tax revenue from taxes on capital gains and rising salaries.

 

Clinton’s large budget surpluses also owe much to the Social Security tax on payrolls. Social Security taxes now bring in more than the cost of current benefits, and the "Social Security surplus" makes the total deficit or surplus figures look better than they would if Social Security wasn’t counted. But even if we remove Social Security from the equation, there was a surplus of $1.9 billion in fiscal 1999 and $86.4 billion in fiscal 2000. So any way you count it, the federal budget was balanced and the deficit was erased, if only for a while.

 

http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budge...-under-clinton/

 

 

 

Number of Americans killed by terrorism in the last decade: 24. Number of Americans killed by guns in the last decade: 280,024.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/st...and-terrorism-/

 

By the New America count, in the time since 9/11, jihadists have killed 26 Americans on U.S. soil, while those with right-wing leanings have killed 39. The single-most deadly event by an Islamic extremist was the 13 people killed at Fort Hood. On the right-wing side of the ledger, the worst was the six people slain at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/state...d-more-america/

 

 

Edited April 30, 2017 by caulfield12

[greg775]

The current estate tax only applies to estates over $5.5 million. As such, it only affects about 0.2% of all estates in any given year, according to the Tax Policy Center.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_...1982_-_2010.gif

I wish people would not lie, not you, but the writer. That just doesn't seem right. I know tons of little people complaining about their parent died and all this money got taxed heavily, even though the person who died paid taxes on that money his/her whole life. I know some families in which the one remaining parent has given his/her kids say, 30,000 bucks at a time, so as to get them that money before they die and it won't be taxed as you can jump dump it in the bank. I feel like the little guy is affected by estate tax even in cases where the estate is well below 5.5 mill. WTF?

Edited April 30, 2017 by greg775

[caulfield12]

You are obsessed with Trump. I could post on the genocide in Armenia and you would respond with some conspiracy theory about his kids, talk about how he's a sexist, make a comparison to Mark Teahen and then post some alphabet soup with italics, bolds, paraentheses and quotations to which the forum's readers will scroll past as if it's an ad trying to sell them a car.

 

I am on left on abortion, same sex marriage, keeping religion out of the public, punishments on nonviolent crime, etc. You are right on what exactly? I don't post links unless entirely necessary or there's breaking news so I don't know what you're talking about. If I post something in line with leftist thinking or mainstream accepted link no one from the groupthink around here will respond to it. They only want to respond to me when they disagree with me and they won't respond if they agree. If I posted a link from some site that leans right I'd get laughed at and condescended and then that same person will go on and post a Salon or Vox link as if they're not a complete and utter hypocrite.

 

You don't have to live in America to know what's going in the world but you can totally be out of touch on what's going on in America and that seems to be the case. That's why you don't think there are any rich people paying a 20% tax. Because that's what Vox and Buzzfeed will tell you as that's what lines up with their distorted reality. You don't know any illegal immigrants. You don't have any take of opinions from people within the coasts. You don't live amongst those who are rich or impoverished. You get your entire intake on America from middle aged white people with journalism degrees living in big cities putting up headline articles to meet their quota.

 

I post articles lots of times that are mainstream or even right-leaning. Believe it or not, if you did post such an article with an opposing viewpoint, the earth would not stand still. Some people would look at it as a sign of maturity in political discourse. But you just talk about your personal hot button items of the day, then defend yourself by arguing you don't have enough time to follow politics as others do.

 

Barack Obama paid 20.3% in tax in a recent year. I'm not sure where you arbitrarily came up with rich as your definition, but I would love to know all those who work at start ups in Silicon Valley or Wall Streeters paying over 20% in Federal taxes. You went by that 20% standard because of capital gains, and honestly think that rate is still too high. You also aren't distinguishing exactly which taxes you're referring to, so you can later include State, local, Sales, VAT/ad valorem, AMT, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc. So what is your definition of rich, and how many of them are paying more percentage-wise than Warren Buffet's secretary?

 

Grew up in Iowa. Heart of Trump territory now. See Steve King and Terry Branstad. We had plenty of illegal immigrants who were itinerant farm workers. I played soccer with lots of them. We also had plenty of illegal immigrants in the Kansas City Missouri Public School District, as well as refugees from Sudan and Somalia, from 2002-2007.

 

I've linked to lots of articles about Trump followers in Wisconsin and Iowa...because I grew up in the Midwest and have seen a lot of those changes firsthand whenever I go home in the summer to visit. Same with Kansas City, where I lived for nearly a decade. But nice assumptions.

 

As to your last point about middle aged journalists on the coasts, that's because 80% of the news we consume comes from there. And the average age is closer to 30-35 now because of the online revolution in publishing. Duh! But I read the Quad City Times, all the Chicago papers, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Kansas City Star, Detroit Free Press and Minneapolis Star Tribune. Last time I checked, those were all flyover territory papers. I just included a Post Dispatch economics article in this very thread. Now if you want to complain about those papers carrying syndicated columns from the coasts, have at it. Maybe you should start your own paper if you feel that passionately about informing everyone about "what's really going on out there."

 

Democracy Dies In Darkness.

Edited April 30, 2017 by caulfield12

[bmags]

Would recommend supporting to left-wing soxtalk:

https://www.patreon.com/mattbruenig

[GoSox05]

Would recommend supporting to left-wing soxtalk:

https://www.patreon.com/mattbruenig

 

Yeah, signed up for this right away. Love Matt's stuff.

[illinilaw08]

I wish people would not lie, not you, but the writer. That just doesn't seem right. I know tons of little people complaining about their parent died and all this money got taxed heavily, even though the person who died paid taxes on that money his/her whole life. I know some families in which the one remaining parent has given his/her kids say, 30,000 bucks at a time, so as to get them that money before they die and it won't be taxed as you can jump dump it in the bank. I feel like the little guy is affected by estate tax even in cases where the estate is well below 5.5 mill. WTF?

 

The estate tax has a $5.5M exemption. That's not a lie.

 

There are investment vehicles wherein your beneficiary will ultimately get taxed on the money. And if your parent passes while owing $$ and a probate estate gets opened, some of that inherited $$ might go to pay creditors.

 

On the first, a good example of this is an inherited IRA. Beneficiaries of an inherited IRA will pay tax on the distributions as income when they are taken.

 

Rabbit, I was away for a couple days, but to get back to our discussion of using trusts to shield yourself from the estate tax, when you transfer real estate (for example) into a trust, the trust, not you individually, own the asset. So if I have a $10M estate, and $6M is real estate, before I die I can put that real estate into a trust. My estate is now $4M and below the estate tax threshold. My $6M in real estate is owned by the trust which controls what happens to the real estate in the event that I die.

 

Here's an article describing how the Clintons are using estate planning to avoid the estate tax.

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/201...e-tax-they-back

[Heads22]

Well, I guess I can let you guys know as my dad had some stocks going to probate.

 

I can also assure you that at the end of the day we are going to be well under that $5 million mark.

[greg775]

The estate tax has a $5.5M exemption. That's not a lie.

 

There are investment vehicles wherein your beneficiary will ultimately get taxed on the money. And if your parent passes while owing $$ and a probate estate gets opened, some of that inherited $$ might go to pay creditors.

 

On the first, a good example of this is an inherited IRA. Beneficiaries of an inherited IRA will pay tax on the distributions as income when they are taken.

 

Rabbit, I was away for a couple days, but to get back to our discussion of using trusts to shield yourself from the estate tax, when you transfer real estate (for example) into a trust, the trust, not you individually, own the asset. So if I have a $10M estate, and $6M is real estate, before I die I can put that real estate into a trust. My estate is now $4M and below the estate tax threshold. My $6M in real estate is owned by the trust which controls what happens to the real estate in the event that I die.

 

Here's an article describing how the Clintons are using estate planning to avoid the estate tax.

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/201...e-tax-they-back

Why did my uncle give his kids chunks of money 30000 at a time to avoid some kind of inheritance tax when he died. He didn't have an estate worth 5.5 mill? There was an understaning if he lived a long time they'd give it back and take care of him, etc.

[caulfield12]

The maximum tax-free gift for each child per year is apparently $14,000....so $28,000 for two, $42,000 for three.

 

They might have started doing that a long time ago when the estate tax was much lower and $10,000 was the maximum allowable gift per year, per child.

[Soxbadger]

Why did my uncle give his kids chunks of money 30000 at a time to avoid some kind of inheritance tax when he died. He didn't have an estate worth 5.5 mill? There was an understaning if he lived a long time they'd give it back and take care of him, etc.

 

Most likely to avoid having to pay for medical expenses. Medicaid has a 5 year look back period. If you get your assets under the threshold 5 years prior, then you get medicaid and dont have to pay medical bills.

 

Without knowing the exact situation its just speculation, but that is my guess.

 

Im guessing that your uncle and his wife, were giving $28k per year (max amount without having to pay gift tax.) There are some other possibilities as well (wanting to avoid probate etc), but Id guess it was to qualify for medicaid.

[caulfield12]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/02/politics/202...rump/index.html

 

CNN handicaps 2020 Democratic field's 22 potential candidates

[Brian]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/02/politics/202...rump/index.html

 

CNN handicaps 2020 Democratic field's 22 potential candidates

 

Gag me with a spoon.

Outside of Biden, who I don't think will run.

Edited May 2, 2017 by Brian

[southsider2k5]

Gag me with a spoon.

Outside of Biden, who I don't think will run.

 

He just said publicly yesterday that he will not run for 2020.

[StrangeSox]

I don't think anyone who is actually planning or even thinking about running in 2020 would say they were in 2017, but yeah Biden isn't running.

[southsider2k5]

I don't think anyone who is actually planning or even thinking about running in 2020 would say they were in 2017, but yeah Biden isn't running.

 

You would think he would at least give a non-committal answer.

[CrimsonWeltall]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/02/politics/202...rump/index.html

 

CNN handicaps 2020 Democratic field's 22 potential candidates

 

Boy am I hyped for that field

[Reddy]

The second half is much more interesting than the first, since it's literally NEVER the people we're talking about now who actually end up getting nominated after a loss like this.

 

I'm intrigued by Howard Schultz, to be honest. I love that guy.

[BigSqwert]

I'm intrigued by Howard Schultz, to be honest. I love that guy.

 

Not sure I want to give another business person with no political experience a chance.

[Nokona]

Sherrod Brown will win the nomination in 2020.

[Reddy]

Not sure I want to give another business person with no political experience a chance.

To lump all business people together because one just so happens to have a clinical personality disorder seems a tad foolish. Schultz has shown he's a powerhouse when it comes to solving problems and making a fortune, while simultaneously looking out for human rights. Consistently ahead of the curve and an activist for progressive causes: offering his workers free college tuition, free health insurance, hiring vets and refugees, protecting LGBT rights, etc etc.

 

I can think of so many worse people for the job, but I'm sure many will want to go a different direction after Trump. We'll see.

[caulfield12]

The most compelling thing about Schultz is that he wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

The Dems need to pick more entrepreneurial candidates that understand how to grow an economy.

 

Oprah, another huge name...just don't see her running at this point in her life.