Current GOP Tax Plan

[Vlad]

(12-21-2017, 03:37 PM)Mike M (the other one) Wrote: Really?
5/3 just passed out bonuses to everyone this year because of the Tax Cut.
I wonder how many more will follow suit??? AT&T??

Boeing, Fifth Third Bank, Wells Fargo
http://time.com/5074911/tax-reform-bill-company-investments-bonuses/

Fed Ex to increase hiring.
And this is just the beginning...
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/20/this-is-just-the-start-of-companies-increasing-spending.html

And lefties continue to *****.

[JustWinBaby]

(12-22-2017, 03:31 AM)Vlad Wrote: Boeing, Fifth Third Bank, Wells Fargo
http://time.com/5074911/tax-reform-bill-company-investments-bonuses/

Fed Ex to increase hiring.
And this is just the beginning...
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/20/this-is-just-the-start-of-companies-increasing-spending.html

And lefties continue to *****.

But but but....all those years telling us "trickle down" was bullshit.

I can't really even be bothered with leftist propaganda and their useless idiots.  80% of this country is too stupid to deserve a vote.

[GMDino]

(12-22-2017, 04:03 AM)JustWinBaby Wrote: But but but....all those years telling us "trickle down" was bullshit.

I can't really even be bothered with leftist propaganda and their useless idiots.  80% of this country is too stupid to deserve a vote.

I'll just repeat myself:

Any one of these companies could have done the same before the tax break.  Less than a week in, with no actual results from the tax scam bill their giving money away is just a publicity stunt.

Time will show, again, that this is a huge mess just waiting to happen.

But I'll enjoy my $25 a week tax break...until it is rescinded because "of the deficit" in the near future.

[GMDino]

http://fox4kc.com/2017/12/20/hundreds-of-metro-att-employees-laid-off-just-before-christmas/

Quote:Hundreds of metro AT&T employees laid off just before Christmas


KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- AT&T has announced layoff’s affecting people in five states, including Missouri.

Just days before Christmas, hundreds of people in the metro found out they will be out of jobs come Jan. 4.

On Dec. 16, the company announced a surplus affecting an estimated 600 employees in Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. The workers affected are both indoor and outdoor technicians.

Many of the layoffs in the metro area affect Direct TV technicians and employees at a local call center.

On Thursday, leaders of the Local 6360 Union held a meeting to offer help and share resources with workers who have been laid off. The meeting falls on the same night AT&T announced $1,000 bonuses for more than 200,000 U.S. employees in response to the GOP Tax Plan passing. Those recently notified of these job cuts say the bonuses seem like a slap in the face.

“How can you lay people off and then give them $1,000 and say that there’s going to be more jobs available? I wish someone could tell me how that’s possible because I have to explain that to my members, and right now at this time of year, this is a difficult pill to swallow,” said Joseph Blanco, president of Local 6360 Communication Workers of America Union.

“It makes no sense. It creates a lot of tension and, quite frankly, a lot of our members are on edge because they don’t understand the direction of this company and its mentality of how they’re being treated,” he said.

Local unions are busy working to set up job interviews for surplus workers and inform them of new opportunities in the area. Local 6360 is also setting up a series of workshops so laid off workers can understand what happens when the paycheck stops and the statewide resources that are available to them.

AT&T contacted Fox 4 with a statement and said they hired more than 800 employees in Missouri in 2016, about 650 in 2017 and are currently hiring nearly 70 more across the state.

Statement:
We’re adding people in many areas where we’re seeing increased customer demand for products and services. At the same time, technology improvements are driving higher efficiencies and there are some areas where demand for our legacy services continues to decline, and we’re adjusting our workforce in some of those areas as we continue to align our workforce with the changing needs of the business. Many of the affected employees have a job offer guarantee that ensures they’ll be offered another job with the company, and we’ll work to find other jobs for as many of them as possible.

As a result of decreasing work volume and to increase efficiency, we are consolidating some call center work currently done at one of our locations in Kansas City (2121 E. 63rd St.) into another company location in San Antonio. Affected employees will be offered the opportunity to work in our center in San Antonio, and a relocation allowance. Work volume at the center has been decreasing due in part to improvements in technology and customers’ increasing preference to communicate with us online.

It's about demand, not how much they save in taxes.  If they were busy they would hire people, if they are not they fire them, excuse me "let them go".

[GMDino]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/atandt-credits-trump-for-bonus-its-union-already-negotiated

Quote:AT&T Credits Trump for Bonus Its Union Already Negotiated
[color=rgba(2, 20, 31, 0.55)]AT&T promised $1,000 in bonuses because of the GOP tax plan on Wednesday. But the union representing AT&T workers bargained for that bonus earlier this month.[/color]

On Wednesday, AT&T’s CEO announced $1,000 bonuses for all AT&T employees. AT&T said the bonuses were the result of corporate tax cuts passed in Congress this week.


But the big payout was to President Donald Trump’s ego. AT&T was already in talks with its union to give holiday bonuses, that union told The Daily Beast. The telecom’s GOP-friendly press release makes it the latest company to praise Trump’s legislative agenda when they need a big favor from the White House.

AT&T’s announcement comes one week after the company reached a new contract agreement with its workers. The contract came after a year of pressure from the workers’ union,  Communication Workers of America. But in the past month, CWA also pushed AT&T to add bonuses based on the GOP’s promises of middle class prosperity under the tax bill.


“Republicans, including the president, said the average household would get $4,000 under this tax plan,” CWA spokesperson Candice Johnson told The Daily Beast. Last month, CWA representatives began contacting AT&T, asking the company to give workers that $4,000 raise.


“This bonus came out of that conversation,” Johnson said. “It’s a start, and we’re going to keep holding our leaders accountable.”


The bonuses might buy more goodwill with the Trump administration. AT&T is currently attempting a merger with Time Warner, but faces opposition from Trump’s Justice Department. In November, the DOJ filed an antitrust lawsuit to block the merger. The week before the suit, Politico reported that the DOJ had threatened to block the merger if Time Warner did not sell CNN, a news network Trump frequently decries as “fake.” After AT&T’s Wednesday bonus announcement, Trump praised the telecom giant.

“This just came out… AT&T plans to increase U.S. capital spending $1 billion and provide $1,000 special bonus to more than 200,000 U.S. employees, and that’s because of what we did,” Trump said in a Wednesday press conference on the bill’s passage in Congress. “That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good.”

AT&T isn’t the first company to suck up to Trump for favors. On the campaign trail, Trump made a talking point of Indianapolis, Indiana’s Carrier plant, which makes heating and cooling systems. Carrier had announced it would outsource approximately 1,000 jobs to Mexico. In a much-hyped “deal,” Trump arranged to give Carrier $7 million in local tax breaks if they protected the Indianapolis jobs.


But beneath the press releases was an ugly reality: Carrier was still planning to outsource jobs in 2017. Those layoffs began earlier this year.



“There are some people who feel they were misled. Because he misled them,” Chuck Jones, president of the labor union representing Carrier workers told The Daily Beast earlier this year. “With him saying what he did that day, and not saying... that 550 jobs were still going to leave that facility and go to Mexico.”


The Japanese company SoftBank pulled a similar ego-stroking stunt shortly after Trump’s election. In October 2016, SoftBank announced plans for a $100 billion Saudi Arabia-backed tech investment fund. Much of that funding was forecasted to go to the U.S., where SoftBank has considerable holdings, and was expected to continue investing money. But when SoftBank announced a not-unexpected $50 billion U.S. investment in December 2016, Trump trumpeted it as a deal of his making. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son “said he would never do this had we (Trump) not won the election!” Trump tweeted.


The investment was also good for SoftBank’s clout. The company owns the owns the wireless network Sprint, and has been eyeing a bid for U.S.-based network T-Mobile, but was discouraged by antitrust laws under the Obama administration. Under a White House more forgiving of companies stretching the limits on the maximum amount of legally allowable market share, SoftBank might make a new pass at a merger.

Even when companies aren’t trying to cozy up to the White House, Trump has been quick to claim their Obama-era gains as his own. In March, Ford announced plans to make major investments in its U.S. plants. But those plans were nothing new—they stemmed from a 2015 agreement with the United Auto Workers union.


“Major investment to be made in three Michigan plants,” Trump tweeted after the announcement. “Car companies coming back to U.S. JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!”That same month, Trump boasted of a $25 billion U.S. investment by Charter Communications “following my election victory.” In fact, the company had pledged the money before the election.


"Today I am thrilled to announce that Charter Communications has just committed to investing $25 billion,” Trump said during a May press conference, “with a B, $25 billion—you’re sure that’s right, right?”

[GMDino]

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/362526-number-of-jobs-lost-to-foreign-trade-since-trumps-election-on-par-with

Quote:Number of jobs lost to foreign competition up since Trump’s election: report

The number of U.S. jobs eliminated due to foreign competition since President Trump's election last year has largely kept pace with previous years, according to a new report.



An analysis of Labor Department data by the labor coalition Good Jobs Nation found that more than 93,000 U.S. jobs have been eliminated since Trump's election due to foreign trade.


That's roughly on par with the previous five years, which saw an average of 87,500 jobs per year eliminated. 


The coalition's analysis also found that the number of jobs outsourced by federal contractors has actually risen since Trump was elected. 
Since November 2016, some of the biggest federal contractors have offshored some 10,269 jobs, making up 11 percent of trade-related layoffs, compared to 4 percent in the previous five years.


Workers who lose their jobs due to foreign trade are eligible for Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), a program that allows them to receive benefits such as subsidized health insurance and extended unemployment benefits.


Good Jobs Nation's analysis relied on the Labor Department's TAA data to track trade-related layoffs, according to the news outlet, though not every job eliminated was offshore and some job losses may have been caused by other factors, such as cheaper imports.


Good Jobs Nation, which says it fights “to hold the President and all politicians accountable to working families,” campaigns to stop offshoring and to increase the minimum wage. The coalition's analysis was first reported by HuffPost.


On the campaign trail and since taking office, Trump has vowed to stymie the flow of U.S. jobs moving overseas, laying out an ambitious goal to renegotiate trade deals, lower the tax burden on American companies and pressure businesses to keep their operations in the U.S.


His administration is currently renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, a deal between the U.S., Mexico and Canada that has frequently been the target of Trump's ire.

[GMDino]

How corporate PR works in 4 parts pic.twitter.com/vr3K4HE5fr

— jordan yule log ️ (@JordanUhl) December 23, 2017

[Yojimbo]

The CEO of AT&T, Randall Stephenson, is a giant piece of shit. He went around selling the tax bill on any medium that would quote him say it would create jobs, all the while knowing these layoffs were happening.

[Belsnickel]

The CBO has made it's projection of when we hit our debt ceiling a bit closer. They are expecting this to happen in early March.

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/371670-cbo-debt-limit-deadline-likely-in-first-half-of-march

[GMDino]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/03/30/the-richest-americans-get-a-33000-tax-break-under-the-gop-tax-law-the-poorest-get-40/?utm_term=.74d524f6a33f

Quote:The richest Americans get a $33,000 tax break under the GOP tax law. The poorest get $40.


The Republican tax law passed last fall will give the richest 1 percent of Americans an average personal income tax break of about $33,000, while the poorest Americans will receive an average personal income tax break of $40, according to a new study published this week by nonpartisan analysts.

The Tax Policy Center, a D.C. think tank, has produced its first analysis of how the GOP law's changes to personal income taxes alone — rather than that of the law overall — affect the rich and poor.

Previous TPC analyses have already looked at the overall distributional effects of the law, which included a giant tax cut to corporations and a reduction in the estate tax paid by the wealthiest families. The new TPC report isolates the impact of the law's personal income taxes, suggesting that the corporate cut does not alone account for the law offering its biggest gains to wealthier Americans.


“While most of the corporate tax cuts flow to the top of the income distribution, what this shows is that even in the direct changes to the individual side of the tax code, most of those changes are still being allocated to the top,” said Kim Rueben, a senior fellow at TPC.

The report shows that the majority of Americans in all 50 states will get a tax cut under the GOP law but that the size of its benefits are uneven.

The biggest winners are the richest 1 percent of Americans, or those earning more than $732,800 every year. The smallest bump goes to the poorest income bracket, defined as earning less than $25,000 annually.

The size of the break is bigger for those in the middle-income brackets. Those earning between $86,000 and $148,000 annually will get an average break of about $1,500, while those earning between $48,000 and $86,000 will get an average of $780.

Americans earning between $25,000 and $48,000 will get an average personal income tax break of $320, the report says.
The richest 1 percent will see its tax burden drop by 1.5 percent, while middle earners see theirs drop by 1.2 percent. The poorest Americans see the smallest change, as their taxes drop by 0.3 percent, according to TPC. A Pew Research Center report from this fall found that those earning $200,000 or more paid about 59 percent of federal income taxes.

When factoring in all the law's provisions, including the corporate rate cut, TPC said the richest Americans get a tax break of $51,140, while the poorest Americans receive one of $60.

“This is getting your hands on the change people will see in their actual 1040s, but the pattern is pretty similar to what we see when we include all provisions in the tax law,” Rueben said.


The report comes as Republicans push the tax law as their signature legislative achievement from controlling both branches of Congress and the White House since the 2016 elections. Democrats have called the tax law a giveaway to corporations and the rich, while Republicans have defended it by saying it offers broad tax relief to millions of Americans and is encouraging business investment that will translate into higher wages.

The law's personal income provisions will cut taxes for more than 60 percent of residents in all 50 U.S. states and the District, according to the TPC analysis.

North Dakota has the most residents coming out ahead, as 75 percent of that state's residents are projected to get a tax cut year because of the personal income provisions. In Ohio, where Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) is up for reelection, at least 69 percent of residents will get a tax cut under the GOP law.

[ Republicans say it’s a tax cut for the middle class. The biggest winners are the rich. ]

Meanwhile, blue states such as New York, California and New Jersey are among those with the fewest beneficiaries of the changes to the tax law's income provisions, although red states such as Georgia and Florida also have fewer beneficiaries than most. To raise revenue for its other cuts, the GOP tax law eliminated deductions that millions of taxpayers claimed and placed a $10,000 cap on the deductions of state and local property taxes. As a result, taxpayers in states with high local taxes — or states controlled by Democrats — are more likely to see tax hikes under the new code.


The analysis shows that even in these states most people will see their taxes cut. “The fact that most individuals in New Jersey and New York see their taxes go down might be surprising,” Rueben said. “A majority of people even there are seeing a tax cut rather than a tax increase.”

Residents of these blue states seeing a take hike are also more likely to face larger tax hikes than those facing tax hikes in red states. About 9 percent of residents of the District will get an average tax increase of $2,300, for instance, while the 3.1 percent of Alaska residents facing a tax hike will pay an extra $730 on average.

The charts below are based on data from TPC's analysis of the personal income tax provisions on the GOP law:

[*michaelsean*]

Well we can always raise their taxes so we can give them a bigger tax cut. It's hard to cut from zero.

[JustWinBaby]

(12-22-2017, 08:05 AM)GMDino Wrote: I'll just repeat myself:

Ummmkay.

Now go learn economics and get a degree and then post something resembiing intelligent understanding.

[GMDino]

(04-06-2018, 05:27 AM)JustWinBaby Wrote: Ummmkay.

Now go learn economics and get a degree and then post something resembiing intelligent understanding.

So your "understanding" is that companies cannot give raises or bonuses without getting tax breaks?

Or is it that you are just willing to ignore that our tax break can/will be taken away but the company ones are permanent?

"intelligent"

[JustWinBaby]

(04-06-2018, 09:15 AM)GMDino Wrote: So your "understanding" is that companies cannot give raises or bonuses without getting tax breaks?

No.  You don't seem to understand economics.  Here's a hint:  Taxes trickle down.  Almost every economics book you can read will tell you that. I suspect you have not read many economics books.

I took Phd courses in economics at one of the best schools in the country.  I had nobel laureates as professors.  Ignorance offends me.

[ballsofsteel]

I was at the University of Toledo about 8 months ago and ran into a Professor of Economics in an elevator. He seemed friendly so I axed him this very question, "Does the trickle down theory work". He said yes it does without going into any detail.
It seems this question has many angles. In theory it should work but to what degree and how much. Personally my perception has always been that if you gave the powers to be $100 in "tax brakes" they might give $10 back after they pocketed the rest. Of course this is a generalization. Still the 10% would be considered "trickle down", no?

[JustWinBaby]

(11-15-2017, 12:47 PM)Nately120 Wrote: Well the only TV station I've been permitted to trust assures me that Obamacare is a disaster, so I say bring it.

Just change the channel to CNN and I'm sure your healthcare becomes magically affordable.

[GMDino]

(04-20-2018, 04:55 AM)JustWinBaby Wrote: No.  You don't seem to understand economics.  Here's a hint:  Taxes trickle down.  Almost every economics book you can read will tell you that.  I suspect you have not read many economics books.

I took Phd courses in economics at one of the best schools in the country.  I had nobel laureates as professors.  Ignorance offends me.

I understand that if my costs go up my prices go up...so I have passed my cost on to the consumer (trickled down).

Now tell me how many example are there of prices going down when cost go down.

There are ample example of how even the latest tax breaks are being used for everything but pay increases for employees.  And one time bonuses are not the same as a pay increase.  While I am sure the are deeply appreciated an actual raise is even better.

To mix my message here it's like all the old adage about how and oil company wants the government to cut regulations and stay out of their business and profits (capitalism) when things are going well, but want the government to bail them out (socialism) when there is a spill or disaster.

You can insert any industry that wants government help everytime they fail at capitalism.

[*Nately120*]

(04-20-2018, 08:19 AM)JustWinBaby Wrote: Just change the channel to CNN and I'm sure your healthcare becomes magically affordable.

Fair enough...what does the real news say though?  What is the real news?  Which channel is real?  I mean, I suppose I could look at my actual financial situation without needing some talking head to sit me on his knee and explain things to me, but that's too hard.

[Belsnickel]

(04-20-2018, 04:55 AM)JustWinBaby Wrote: No.  You don't seem to understand economics.  Here's a hint:  Taxes trickle down.  Almost every economics book you can read will tell you that. I suspect you have not read many economics books.

I took Phd courses in economics at one of the best schools in the country.  I had nobel laureates as professors.  Ignorance offends me.

Some economic theories tell us that, but the application has seen decreasing taxes and a widening income and wealth gap in this country. What could one extrapolate from this correlation about the economic theories that tell us taxes trickle down?

[fredtoast]

(04-20-2018, 04:55 AM)JustWinBaby Wrote: No.  You don't seem to understand economics.  Here's a hint:  Taxes trickle down.  Almost every economics book you can read will tell you that.  I suspect you have not read many economics books.

I took Phd courses in economics at one of the best schools in the country.  I had nobel laureates as professors.  Ignorance offends me.

Is Warren Buffett ignorant?

How about Allen Greenspan?

Instead of just slurping up the theory you were taught in the classroom you should have been paying more attention to reality.  Remember when lower interest rates were supposed to promote growth but instead were used to fund massive stock buy backs that benefitted the wealthy stock holders?  Same thing is happening with tax breaks.  

At a time when stock prices and corporate profits were at record highs why did corporations need more tax breaks?  Why were they taking record profits instead of lowering prices or raising the wages of their workers BEFORE the tax breaks?  How many billions of dollars of US corporate profits held overseas have been re-patriated since these tax breaks?