I am sick of free trade being stifled… Whoever makes the best product should get the money having the products I buy dictated to me is unamerican
Trump floats more shit than a sewage treatment plant.
And he will do it.
He has to figure out this thing with a boat, a shark, and a battery…
But once he works that one out, China will be paying our taxes.
Now look at this in the context of increasing domestic production, so we’d be importing less even before increasing tariffs. Revenue will hit rock bottom in record time.
The US tax rate is very similar to other nations, the only difference is what we spend our tax money on. Most rational nations spend their tax money on their citizens. The US spends it on other poor countries citizens, but not in the way you are thinking. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bury Palestinians under rubble. Hundreds of billions to cover Yemen people alive while they sleep. Meanwhile, school teachers in America have classes over 30 students and have to buy their own school supplies.
This is such a gloriously uninformed opinion. The benefits to the US from being a global superpower are staggering, investing a million dollars in shutting down the Houthi attacks on merchant ships or whatever returns hundreds of millions of investment back to the US by way of trade (also, they are “spending” that money on the wages of nationals, it’s not leaving the country). The Israeli Hamas is a proxy war with Iran, it’s unethical and utterly immoral, but to argue that it’s costing the US money is flawed.
There are real areas us spending is bad, the fact that the US spends over 17% of gdp on healthcare when other countries like Australia spend less than 11% does mean that Americans are spending too much money on healthcare (and literally getting shit for it), but it still doesn’t mean that they are destroying 6% of GDP.
We spend more on the military than the next ten countries combined. TWO of which are actively engaged in open conflict with each other.
I’m not sure that you understand my point. Spending money on military is an economic gain for the USA, for every cent spent they gain dollars in returns. It’s a “good” investment (from an amoral financial perspective, as said above, the ethics are appalling). Another country who spends less but also has a return to their economy less than they spend (like North Korea) is a bad use of taxpayer money. The amount of spend/return isn’t relevant, the ratio is what matters.
Jesus Christ. Why is it that republicans think destroying the country will be better than what we currently have? It’s so fucking insane.
Because it will be better FOR THEM only
Is there an infographic about this I can give to my maga relatives when they inevitably bring this up, so I don’t actually have to talk about it with them?
See this is the kind of thing that makes zero actual sense but his supporters pretend to believe he can accomplish it worse they actually believe him.
Take a look at the JOLTS data
516k job openings in April, 385k separations and 382k hires. That’s a deficit of about 100k jobs that aren’t being filled in manufacturing alone. The problem isn’t a lack of manufacturing jobs, in fact it’s the opposite. We have over a hundred thousand manufacturing jobs we can’t fill, and this matches what I hear through the grapevine at my work which does contract industrial cleaning. People don’t want those jobs, and people take advantage of the opportunities available to them to get out of those jobs. Trump would destroy the countries economy if he actually managed to implement this plan
There’s a quote from Arthur Harris that I think shows a pretty fundamental insight into the mind of a fascist.
“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else and no one was going to bomb them.”
Someone like Trump just does not think, “And then what will they do when we triple our tariffs on their goods.” It’s an innate narcissism, the belief that everyone else exists to do things to and not to have agency of their own.
This isn’t even getting into the reality that this is just another regressive tax scheme designed to shift even more of the tax burden onto the working class.
Someone did the math and realized we would need a 130% tariff on all goods to replace current income tax revenue.
People’s number one concern is inflation. If that tariff is created we will see 100% inflation over night!
Someone did the math and realized we would need a 130% tariff on all goods to replace current income tax revenue.
And probably didn’t take into account that actually the tariff would need to be even higher since imports would drop drastically from the current amount.
I believe 130% was the conservative estimate.
Jesus Christ, we learned that fixing the economy via tariffs was bad in 1930. Like holy shit, tariffs are nearly universally agree by every field of economics to be shitty for citizens, businesses, and then the country. It makes no one inside want to buy anything but the simple basics, even with the basics now costing much much more.
I am not a “free trade” person, but this is not how you “Make America Great Again”. Even Ronald Reagan and Dubya didn’t do tariffs as a replacement for other things.
Yes, but Trump has a “relationship with MIT” and a “very good brain” so what would those economists know?
The relationship is knowing MIT and not even knowing what it stands for…
Do you know the real reason why he said he had a relationship with MIT? Because his uncle, John Trump, was a professor there.
I have a cousin who was prominent physicist at a prestigious university. Meanwhile, I dropped out of college. I wouldn’t even dream of suggesting I had any sort of understanding of physics because of my cousin. In fact, he has something named after him and he once tried to explain it to me and I couldn’t understand what the hell he was talking about.
I still stand by my words lmao
Trump is so stupid that he has no idea how stupid he sounds.
He probably thinks it refers to Mitt Romney.
How about we eliminate income taxes and replace it with corporate carbon emissions tax, AND cut fuel subsidies.
How much can a banana cost Michael, $1000?
Great idea but it’s bullshit that this could ever be implemented.
It’s not a great idea. It would make the US a walled garden as all our exports become harshly taxed by the rest of the world. The country wouldn’t collapse but our standard of living, education, and healthcare would drop precipitously.
Income tax is such a bitch to deal with. I used to support the idea of replacing it with GST/VAT because then I’d not have to deal with it. But then someone pointed out that disproportionately benefits the rich (who mostly just hold wealth rather than spend it) and disadvantages the poor (who cannot avoid paying for things).
So fuck it. Make it all income tax and get rid of the others! :P
(In before this is also a bad idea somehow)
It’s the most practical tax idea I’ve heard in forty years, tbh.
Heard about the Land Value Tax 41 years ago, huh?
Taxes usually start out simple, since that appeals to people. Then over time they get more complicated as people discover more and more edge cases to exploit.
If you make it all income tax, well, what counts as “income”? Elon Musk just got “paid” $46 billion worth of stock in Tesla, for example. But it’s not actually 46 billion dollars. It’s a share in ownership of a company. Those shares can’t actually be sold for 46 billion dollars. Trying to sell them would cause their price to drop. He can’t actually sell them at all right away, for that matter - they’re restricted stock. He has to hold on to them for a while, as incentive to keep doing a good job as CEO.
So if he keeps doing a good job as CEO and the stock goes up in value by 10 billion dollars, was that rise in value income? What if it goes down by 10 billion instead?
This stuff is inherently complicated. I’m not sure that any simple tax system is going to work.
I don’t know if this isn’t already a thing, but if he uses that stock as collateral to overpay for another social media company, or some other stupid flex, he should be taxed on that valuation with no deductions whatsoever.
Darn it, you’re right.
And as I suspected would be the case, some other folks have responded to my comment with a bunch of additional “simple” suggestions for what to do in this case. Which have hidden exceptions of their own, which will have unexpected impacts and loopholes, which will then elicit further “simple” suggestions for how to fix them, and before you know it we’ve got a complex tax code again.
There’s an old quote of unclear providence that I think applies here, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”.
Elon Musk just got “paid” $46 billion worth of stock in Tesla.
He should have to pay income tax on the value of the stock on the day he “took possession” of it.
In 3 years, he says something on Twitter to pump the stock, and dumps a lot of it. He should have to pay tax (capital gains?) on the additional value of the stock that he sells.
If the value goes down and he sells it, it’s a deduction.
It should be a moderately progressive income tax. That is to say the lowest earning bracket should pay nothing as a percentage of their income, the next bracket should pay a little bit, the next bracket a little higher % of their income, all the way up to billionaires who should be taxed out of billionaire status. I can certainly afford to pay a higher % of my income to taxes than someone who isn’t sure where their next meal is coming from, but my bosses and their bosses, and the people who own the building should be paying way more on their income than me. Also we need to get rid of the shenanigans that allows the ultra wealthy to avoid income tax altogether through loans and what not.
Progressive tax brackets make things complicated, in myt opinion. I always like the idea of a large tax free bracket and then taxing. 30-40% for the rest. No tax deduction, everybody has to pay up. You could also go for fixed tax brackets like 15%, 25% and 35% and also no tax deductions.
The problem is that tax deductions/credits are a useful tool for guiding certain activity. We want people to put up solar panels, so we give a tax credit for that.
The other argument for a progressive system is using money for necessities instead of luxuries or investment. Your first $40k or $50k or so is spent on the basic cost of living. After that, you’re using increasing amounts for things you don’t strictly need. So you want to tax that first $50k or so very little, perhaps none at all, and then ramp it up on the people who are just spending money on fast cars or dumping it into SPY or whatever.
There’s a ton of twisty little ways the tax system makes everything fair-ish. Turns out, running a country of 330M people and an annual GDP of $25T is complicated. It’s not always a fair system, but it’s more fair than it looks at first glance.
For clarity, say Kalkaline earns 100k a year. Ideally the billionaires would bring home exactly the same on their first 100k as Kalkaline does.
Marginal tax rate means the higher tax brackets only tax you in the money made above a certain amount. And it’s the same for the next higher up tax bracket, which doesn’t apply to any lower money.
If you’re not getting welfare, there is no “next tax bracket” that’s going to make you bring home less when earning more. That’s not a thing.
If you get a bonus, that might be taxed at 50% because payroll is too lazy to figure out your taxes. You get the remainder back when you file your taxes. (Note this may mean you owe $200 at the end of the year instead of owing $1000. That still counts as you “getting” $800.)
We could put an 80% marginal tax rate on incomes above a billion dollars, and it wouldn’t really touch someone who was only bringing home 1,030 million dollars a year.
If you get a bonus, that might be
taxedwithheld at 50% because payroll is too lazy to figure out your taxes. You get the remainder back when you file your taxes. (Note this may mean you owe $200 at the end of the year instead of owing $1000. That still counts as you “getting” $800.)One very slight correction in bold.
Also it’s 22% and it’s not solely because payroll is lazy. It’s actually set by federal statute
That must be before other, additional payroll taxes.
I’d prefer a 70% tax on billionaires, but I’d settle for 50% for anything above 5million. Take Elon for example, the guy makes an estimated $50,000USD per minute. Yes folks, the guy makes more per minute than the average American does in a year.
prove to me that billionaires should exist. Tax them accordingly.
Removed by mod
No that’s about right. The big problem we have right now is we’ve lost the ability to effectively tax people who don’t live on an “income”. So we need a second system for people who are insanely wealthy.
Be mad that income tax is unnecessarily difficult to deal with. As has been pointed out by others online a lot recently, the US makes personal income taxes hard, where other countries you can fill it out in minutes if you have no deductions, and less than an hour if you do (and have kept good records).
No one likes paying taxes (usually) but since the process is so painless I don’t hear people complaining about income tax that much (outside of the right-wing media in my country, Australia)
