The Right Side of the News

Uh, sure, but with trepidation since your misconceptions and inability to admit you're wrong usually just results in pages and pages of silly objections. You still sound like you're describing the national debt. If you are really talking about deficits then this is a really strange way to describe them. You are correct. Federal income tax revenues have increased slightly over the past three years: There are other sources of national revenue in addition to income taxes. For example, I'm sure revenue from tariffs have increased enormously. It is likely that all the increases in the deficit are due to increased spending.--Percy

Life expectancy in the US has long lagged behind other peer nations (countries in the Organization for Economic Development, the OECD), but finally in 2018 it ticked slightly upward. As can be seen in the graph on the left (the graph on the right is about health spending), the US began to trail the OECD during the Bush administration, then began to waver and decline during the Obama administration: Driving the improvement were a decline in drug overdoses for the first time in 28 years, but primarily a decline in the cancer death rate.What most countries in the OECD have that the US does not is some form of national health program.Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/...fc-eefa848cde99_story.html--Percy

It's a mental confusion issue. I said "deficit," the article I cited said "deficit" (see Message 4680), yet somehow you thought it was about the national debt. How do you manage to pack so many errors into such a small number of words? First, Percy did call it "deficits," see Message 4680. Second, Trump *is* running up trillion dollar deficits, read the article I cited: https://www.washingtonpost.com/...-imbalance-continues-widenYou could have invested the effort to actually read and comprehend what I posted. And you have the entire Internet at your disposal and could have looked things up. But no, you instead chose to post your ignorant confusions and errors. We can never have any meaningful discussions because all our time is spent trying to convince you of the many things you believe that are demonstrably untrue.--Percy

This is still just as wrong as the first time you said it, but since you said it again I'll rebut it again. SNAP costs began falling under Obama during his second term and continued to fall under Trump: And the unemployment rate began falling under Obama around 2010, fell every year since, and have continued falling under Trump: You have really got to stop getting all your "information" from conservative talk show hosts. They're lying to you to get you worked up so that you have to keep coming back to get another adrenaline fix. Read some actual news.--Percy

Except that the rich didn't expand their businesses. There has been no significant increase in business investment since the Trump tax cuts, and concerning economic growth, here's the latest CBO data and projections: As you can see, economic growth quickened during 2016 and continued into the Trump years, but last year experienced the slowest growth of the Trump era (2.3%) and was only 2.1% in the fourth quarter. GDP growth is projected to continue declining. You're purposefully misstating the position. No one wants to eliminate the wealthy. The argument is that income should be taxed fairly, which means that in any progressive tax system, such as ours, the more income the higher percentage of that income one pays in taxes.Unfortunately it doesn't work this way. Through a variety of tax loopholes only available to those of wealth, higher income usually means lower taxes, as measured by percentage. For example, Mitt Romney pays about 20% of his annual income in taxes, and his annual income is many, many millions of dollars. When I was working I paid around 18%, and I never made anywhere close to a million dollars in any single year. Does that sound fair to you? You are again purposefully misstating the position. No one wants to eliminate capitalism and have the state own the means of production. Why do you keep raising this bogeyman? In western parlance socialism only mean social programs like Social Security, Medicare, SNAP, and so forth. Everyone's in favor of capitalism. Why are you implying some aren't?--Percy

Why do you continue making these ludicrously wrong statements? This has been disproven over and over. Here's the graph of the unemployment rate again: The unemployment rate began dropping around 2010 and has been dropping ever since.And here is the graph of GDP growth. GDP resumed growing after 2010 and has been growing ever since: There was a giant recession, almost a depression, that began at the end of the Bush presidency and continued through the first year of so of the Obama presidency. You can accurately characterize the economy as staggering at that time. For the rest of the Obama presidency there was continuous growth.--Percy

The Constitution gives Congress control over the purse strings, though of course the president does have influence because he must sign all legislation. Presidents are responsible for spending the money Congress allocates on the programs it creates through legislation.But presidents have their ways. I'm reminded of one of the early American presidents, it might have been Monroe, who wanted congressional funding for a world tour by the US Navy as a show of American strength. Congress wouldn't allocate the funds, so Monroe sent the fleet halfway around the world, which is all he had discretionary funds for, and then told Congress that if they wanted the fleet back that they'd have to allocate the money for it, which they did. They're called entitlements, and it's not true that they cannot be cut. They can be both increased and reduced through legislation. For instance, Trump has proposed reducing Social Security and Medicare in order to help reduce the deficit.What makes these programs entitlements is that anyone who qualifies under the specified criteria gets the money that year, regardless of anything like tax revenues or the size of the deficit that year. For example, many people defer receiving Social Security until age 70, but if some economic event caused a much larger number of people to decide to apply now then that would increase the financial demands upon Social Security. Everybody who applies and qualifies gets the money.But Congress can always make changes to the level of benefits. It has been predicted that sometime in, I think, the 2030's that Social Security will no longer be solvent and that benefits will have to be cut. I don't see what's so hard to understand. Ask questions.About Democrats wanting to cut the military, I don't really know. But I hope everyone would like to reduce our foreign entanglements so that we can reduce military spending.--Percy

The Obama deficits during the 2010 recession were enormous, historic, and not expected to be exceeded anytime soon: --Percy

Yes, Faith, write a book. You are a fantastic writer, and the forceful and effective way you make your points for the Trumpist point of view, particularly the way you make up or ignore facts as circumstances dictate, is top notch. I don't mean this as an insult. Your propaganda is amazing, especially since you believe it yourself. Kellyanne Conway has nothing on you. Let the conservative talk show hosts fill your head, then let the words flow.You'll need a detailed outline, maybe you could get some help here.Or maybe you want to write a novel. You can get practice at sites like NaNoWriMo.--Percy

Tracing back through the subdiscussion, you're talking about Social Security. It does not come out of tax money. When you were working you might recall that your paystubs had three federal deductions:

• Federal income tax
• Social Security
• Medicare

This month's Social Security payroll deductions fund this month's Social Security payments. There's a trust fund that's currently at a surplus to smooth out the inevitable variations.The trust fund is expected to begin running a deficit next year and will be insolvent by around 2035.--Percy

The only one here who's demonstrated confusion, ignorance, and an inability to look anything up, is you. Practically every claim you've made has been documented to be wrong.So of course you're impelled to throw up your hands and declare, "Nobody really knows anything for sure, we're all equals here," but that's not true.--Percy

Income tax revenues have increased slightly under Trump. I posted this earlier: I don't know about other sources of government revenue, but I expect income from tariffs have also increased.--Percy

This is actually for Faith. Your post just provided the opportunity to comment on a couple things. You said a lot of this stuff yourself, but it doesn't hurt to repeat it. The truly rich (as opposed to high income people) have a huge variety of ways to mitigate their tax burden, so it seems unlikely that any change in the tax code would cause them to leave the country. Their tax attorneys would just find alternate avenues for lessening the tax burden. Plus the truly rich can live (establish their residence) anywhere in the world they want, since private jets can flit them about. JonF originally said "the rich and corporations," and Faith truncated it to just "the rich." Most people do not work for "the rich." They work for companies, some big, some small, some somewhere in the middle. Cutting taxes on the rich is not going to employ many more people. The rich can only buy so many cars and boats and jets and houses and fancy vacations, and they can only employ so many maids and butlers and pool boys. The money they save from lower taxes will mostly go into investments or trust funds for the kids and so on.So this brings us to the effect of cutting corporate taxes on jobs, and it turns out it just isn't that great. The economy is a bunch of interlocking pieces that includes supply, demand and workforce availability. If Apple takes the money they save in taxes and builds a new plant to manufacture more iPhones, who are they going to sell them to? Just because they have more money to spend doesn't mean there's higher demand for iPhones.So many corporations used their tax bounty to increase bonuses, pay down debt, buy back stock, upgrade or replace aging equipment, etc. Most did not employ more workers.That doesn't mean that cutting corporate taxes didn't improve employment. It did. Just not to the spectacular extent you keep claiming. This is the unemployment rate through the beginning of 2018: I couldn't find a graph that goes all the way through 2019, but the current unemployment rate is 3.7%, just a little lower than the rightmost point on that graph. There's no spectacular drop in unemployment. It's just a continuation of the decline in unemployment that began in 2010 under Obama and that you like to keep ignoring.That I keep telling you this probably makes you think I'm plugging Obama, but I'm not. You keep accusing me of being a leftist, but I'm a fiscal conservative. That means I'm neither an Obama fan or foe. He had policies I liked and policies I didn't like.But even if the previous administration had been someone's who I detested beyond ken, I would still call you out for being dead wrong to claim the economy was a mess until Trump took over. It was not. It had been continuously improving for over six years. Trump then embraced policies that continued that improvement.Another important point. At the end of the Obama administration the unemployment rate was already 4.7%, by historical standards already very low. Traditionally, anything below around 5% is considered full employment, plus or minus a percentage point or so. There is not much lower to go.But the full employment point is also considered the inflation threshold. This is not a hard and fast rule, of course. It just means that once you reach full employment that inflation becomes a risk that has to be carefully monitored.But even more concerning is the current very low unemployment rate combined with huge deficits. How can we have that combination and also such low inflation? Is the low unemployment rate masking a structural problem, such as low wages or the necessity of holding two or more jobs to make ends meet or the high cost of housing? Food for thought.--Percy

We may be interpreting "evidence offered as the truth" differently. Doesn't that refer to what people swear to do under oath? And that when (for example) Fiona Hill testifies to what Bolton said to her, she is only attesting to the words he spoke and not to the truth of those words.I am a fan of precision, but formal definitions aren't always the best way to communicate meaning to laypeople. That's why there's the effort to translate legalese into common language for documents that laypeople have to sign, like mortgage agreements and so forth.I like describing hearsay simply, that it is information one acquires secondhand, i.e., from someone or something else. Information one hears or witnesses cannot be hearsay. It's only when you testify to information someone else heard or witnessed that it becomes hearsay. Or at least that's the way I understand it.I've been wanting to comment on the "originator of the statement isn't present" portion that you've cited in a lot of posts (I haven't gone back to your posts to verify, so I should add that what you cited was not necessarily in those words). I hope that "present" only means "available to give testimony" and not actually present in the courtroom.--Percy

Combining several posts in this quote because the posts themselves quoted nothing (but hey, am I complaining? Uh, yes, I guess I am. ): While I can't buy the argument that low taxes are in general a disincentive to investment in the business, I do think that the Trump tax cuts, made in an economy that was already well on it's way to overheating, provided very little incentives for businesses to grow.But we probably agree that, independent of the corporate tax environment, the best way to incentivize businesses to grow is to present them with increased demand, which is best done by putting more money in people's pockets through cuts to personal income taxes.--Percy