Laugh of the Day: "Now there are only 32 states with Republican governors"

Seen in the comments to "Dems win from coast to coast" at The Hill.

The mice that roared.

The new governors of Virginia and New Jersey will be Democrats

Real Clear has called both races even though just 5% of the vote is in in New Jersey.

New Jersey is a flip, having been governed by Republican Chris Christie.

Virginia stays Democrat. Ed Gillespie loses another one, having run unsuccessfully for the US Senate previously and now for governor.

Comey's early FBI draft memos on Hillary in May 2016 called her "grossly negligent"

But by July she was just "extremely careless".

John Solomon for The Hill notes here that 

'The change is significant, since federal law states that gross negligence in handling the nation’s intelligence can be punished criminally with prison time or fines. ... “There is evidence to support a conclusion that Secretary Clinton, and others, used the email server in a manner that was grossly negligent with respect to the handling of classified information,” reads the statement, one of Comey’s earliest drafts from May 2, 2016.'

You know you're living in an upside down world when they're trying to put Flynn where Bergdahl ought to be

Bush 41 has now admitted voting for Hillary

Good thing his parachute jumping days are behind him. Could be more dangerous now.

Joy-Ann Reid is not too bright, except she does correctly intuit that there is no contradiction between economic liberalism and socialism, as Spengler once pointed out

New York Antifa demonstration fizzles on November 4th, only diehard commies show up

And it wasn't even raining.

From the story here:

[A] little more than 300 people showed up, according to NYPD officers tasked with securing it. Many of the signs Refuse Fascism had prepared sat stacked against a metal railing. Organizers handed out leaflets about the Revolutionary Communist Party, an older, radical group with ties to Refuse Fascism. Over a thousand people had previously committed to going to the November 4 protests on Facebook, and roughly five thousand had pledged interest, but when all was said and done, burgeoning leftist groups like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), protest mainstays like Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the masked anarchists that had captured the imagination of people on the far right failed to attend.

Laugh of the Day: President Copafeel calls President Trump a blowhard

Ruh-roh, in his senile dotage 41 has also taken to feelin' up the ladies at photo-ops, hence the permanent shit-faced grin.

Story here.

How to tax the rich and only the rich as originally intended in 1913, and solve a lot of problems

In 1913 when the average Joe made about $800 a year, the first income tax under the 16th Amendment didn't worry him because he didn't pay it and probably thought he never would. The personal exemption for a married couple in the original tax code was $4,000.

Today that $4,000 personal exemption adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index amounts to about $100,000.

Even in 2016 that kind of income is made by fewer than 10% of individual wage earners. Under the original income tax of 1913, 90% today wouldn't have to worry about paying the dreaded income tax either.

Is there a way to return to this golden age of taxation?

I'm here to tell you that I think so, and I say that as a conservative. We could easily simplify the tax code by returning to the status quo which prevailed before the First World War, pay all the bills, abolish Social Security and Medicare taxes, the corporate income tax and all the other little irritating taxes and reduce income inequality in the process. We'd also save a lot of time and money wasted in complying with the tax code's myriad baroque features.

Here's the math.

In 2016 according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis personal income in the United States was $15.9287 trillion.

Social Security's Office of the Chief Actuary tells us that in 2016 there were 163.5 million individual wage earners. If you exempt the first $100,000 of everybody's individual wage income in 2016, including from the rich, you're talking about $6.213 trillion of individual wage income which would be tax-free.

That leaves $9.7157 trillion of personal income left in 2016 to tax, to pay all the bills.

According to The Tax Policy Center, the bills were the total estimated federal outlays of $3.9513 trillion in 2016.

So, the tax is 40.67% (9.7157 X .4067 = 3.9513) on all personal income in excess of $100,000 a year, no itemized deductions, no credits of any kind (this is where they all came from in the first place, because the rich pissed, moaned and complained and bribed the politicians to carve out privileges for them to escape paying).

The rich, all 14.9 million of them, will still have $7.2544 trillion to play with ($1.49 trillion from their first $100K tax-free, just like everybody else, and $5.7644 trillion left over after taxes from the income in excess of $100K).

The rest of us, 148.6 million, won't pay any federal income tax, Social Security or Medicare tax, gasoline tax, or any other kind of federal tax on our $4.723 trillion. The only taxes we'll have to pay will be State and Local Income Taxes, property taxes, sales taxes and the like. Of course rich people will have to pay those too, but that's a problem for all of us and for a different level of politics.

I summarize:

$15.9287 trillion personal income 2016 (BEA)

-  3.9513 trillion federal taxes, all from those making $100,000+ per year @40.67%

-  7.2544 trillion left over for the 14.9 million making $100,000+ per year (top 10%)

-  4.7230 trillion left over for the 148.6 million making less than $100,000 per year (bottom 90%)

___________________________________________________________________

0

And the budget balances.   

House Republicans won't allow floor amendments to tax reform, will ram it through instead

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Kevin Brady, quoted here:

He also said that there would be no House floor amendments to the bill, and that changes would be made in his committee and potentially in a conference with the Senate down the road.

In all seriousness, Republican elimination of personal exemptions is just sleight of hand to raise your taxes

In 2017, the personal exemption is $4,050.

If your little tribe is six, mommy, daddy, and four kids, your personal exemptions add up to $24,300.

Add in the standard deduction for a married couple filing jointly of $12,700 and you are up to $37,000 shielded from taxation. (Itemize deductions instead and you might shield even more, but Republicans are proposing new limits on those, too).

The new Republican tax reform, however, eliminates the personal exemptions and caps all this at the new higher standard deduction of $24,000, thus exposing $13,000 to taxation that wouldn't have been exposed before. And you'll pay at a higher rate in the lowest bracket, too, which has been raised from 10% to 12%.

That's what's really going on here. The only way this benefits families is if those families are small. And, of course, small families implies something else: more immigration.

It's anti-American and anti-family, and in fact, it's inhumane. Taxes were always meant to be personal, and by eliminating personal exemptions for the first time in history the libertarians who wrote this bill are showing their purely materialistic hand.

You aren't a human being to them. You're merely capital.

Don't let them get away with this.

Republican elimination of personal exemptions gives me an idea for truly revolutionary tax reform

In 1913 when the income tax began there was no such thing as the standard deduction. That didn't come along until 1944.

The original income tax was a class tax, a tax on the wealthy, just as was the corporate tax instituted in 1909. From the beginning it came with a personal exemption of $3,000 and if you were married $4,000. Dependent exemptions didn't begin to be added until 1917, starting at $200.

Guess what the personal exemption of $4,000 would be in 2016, adjusted for inflation? $100,000. Times all the individual wage earners in America in 2016 $16.3 trillion would be exempt from taxation. In the third quarter of 2017, personal income in the United States wasn't even $16.5 trillion. 

In other words, the original personal exemptions of the tax code adjusted for inflation would exempt all current personal income from taxation, except for maybe $200 billion.

As far as I'm concerned, the government can have that.

Now that's what I call a tax reform.

Most Americans will be hoodwinked by Republican tax reform because they never do their own taxes

56% use a paid preparer, and 34% use tax software, according to figures reported here.

That means 90% of individual filers really have no idea how the numbers have worked in the past, and therefore they are most likely going to have not the slightest idea how the tax reform will change them.

I'm betting Republicans are counting on this as they try to rush this through by Thanksgiving.

Your goose is cooked, sir.

Republican tax reform includes a sneaky tax increase on itemizers, removing the personal exemption privilege

Josh Barro, here:

Currently, you get to take the personal exemption even if you also itemize deductions, but you get to take the standard deduction only if you forego itemized deductions. Combining these provisions into a single, standard deduction would mean itemizers lose their personal exemption and get nothing back — meaning they'll typically pay tax on an extra $4,050 of income if they're single, or $8,100 if they're married.

Total nonfarm jobs grow at the pathetic pace of 167,000 per month y/y in October 2017

PAYEMS

Ron Wyden: Republicans to let corporations deduct state and local income taxes but not individuals

The Democrat Senator is quoted here:

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said that Republicans were employing a double standard, giving corporations a better deal than individuals. ... “Corporations will still get to deduct their state and local taxes, but individuals and families won’t,” Wyden said.

The Republican tax reform is evil: It goes after the very young and the very old

Parents of large families no longer get dependent exemptions for their multiple children under the proposed Republican tax reform, thereby exposing more of their income to taxation, income which parents need to raise these future taxpayers. It's almost as if Republicans are trying to discourage giving birth to the future country.

And medical expenses are no longer a thing under the plan. It's mostly elderly people who rely on the deduction of medical expenses to keep solvent in old age, but the deduction also helps others who experience catastrophic medical expenses under high deductible plans or under no plan. It's almost as if Republicans want these people to suffer complete and utter penury because of medical necessity.

For the first time in my Republican life I'm having to consider that Republicans deliberately went after these two groups, the most vulnerable in our society. It's almost unthinkable after all these years that the pro-life party is nothing of the sort.

If stuff like that stays in the plan I'm going to be facing the prospect of having to consider seriously voting for the enemy.

Who knows. Maybe that's what Republicans want. They've become so liberal now maybe they want us to fulfill this very clearly expressed tax reform death wish by throwing them out of office.

Tax reform verdict: Big business likes the plan released today, the broad market just shrugged

The DOW gave a thumbs up . . .

. . . but the broadest measure of the market just shrugged.

Big business gets a tax rate cut to 20%, but pass-throughs only to 25%

Republicans are favoring established big businesses at the expense of smaller and independent businesses. In essence they are protecting the already successful from those who only dream of being as successful. Combine the loss of other deductions being eliminated under the tax reform proposal and pass-through filers will find that their big tax cut is not so big after all. 

"One rate for thee, but another for me".

From the story here:

The bill would lower the top rate for income from "pass-through" businesses from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. These businesses, which include some small businesses, otherwise have their income taxed through the individual code on their owners' returns. But NFIB [National Federation of Independent Business] says that most small businesses wouldn't qualify for the lower rate because of the way the new rate is structured.

Additionally, the bill as a default position would not allow income from personal services businesses, such as law and accounting firms, to be eligible for the 25-percent rate.

Republican war on itemized deductions eliminates medical expense deduction

From the story here:

Under current law, the IRS allows individuals to deduct qualified medical expenses that exceed 10 percent of a person’s adjusted gross income for the year. The bill would repeal that itemized deduction, effective in 2018.

This is part of The Swamp's incremental war against taxpayer deductions.

For decades the threshold was 7.5% of AGI. Then under Obamacare it became 10%. Now it's gone entirely.

These greedy bastards must be stopped.