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  • Originally posted by snapper View Post
    Surely the amount of politics involved in your University life depends partly at least on what you studied? I did 'the Greats' Classics and Philosophy for my BA and our arguments were mostly about Rome vs Greece or subjectivism vs empiricism (Kant vs Hume etc). I honestly never discussed politics with any of my Profs and couldn't tell you how they voted. We discussed the politics of ancient Greece and Rome etc - I was a Roman Republican and pro Sparta - but I honestly could not say how my Profs voted on any course - particularly in epistemology and logic courses it is irrelevant. I never joined any political society either - only the Classics and Philosophy Societies and formed the Abrahamic Society with some friends to get discourse between Christians, Jews and Muslims on the shared heritage of the three faiths. Apart from that it was just books and study, little time for anything else. Only those not interested in their subjects get involved in politics at Uni in my view. I was interested and loved my study and my Profs.
    Precisely so Snapper. I wouldn't have been able to tell you the politics of most of my History & philosophy lecturers. It didn't come up & wasn't relevant. It was sometimes more obvious in other disciplines, but not always.
    sigpic

    Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C

    Comment


    • gunboat,

      drop the personal discussion, this does not help anyone.
      There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

      Comment


      • Originally posted by astralis View Post
        gunboat,

        drop the personal discussion, this does not help anyone.
        Understood. But sometimes I can't help but poke the dragon.

        Comment


        • Originally posted by Bigfella View Post
          Not angry, just bored with dickheads whose greatest intellectual achievement is to troll the internet. If you can't even follow a link then we can assume constructing an argument is a bit much to expect. Continuing to verbal me and for a second post in a row simply proves the point I made about you in the first. You have made no attempt to contribute to the discussion.

          I've probably worked on contracts for several hundred different companies as well as some government entities. So, wrong again. I have a huge collection of hand & power tools that get used regularly (including this morning). You really aren't very good at this, are you?

          Now I'm done playing 20 questions and helping you troll. Fuck off & let the grownups get back to their discussions like a good boy.
          Yeah, I'm might be trolling. But I do enjoy your replies and WABs seems a bit quiet these days.

          Now excuse me whilst I blow some wind up your arse Bigfella but you are one of my favorite forum posters. I pretty much disagree with all your political opinions but will always make sure to read your take on things. You seem to be able to explain all your wrong ideas and opinions in a logical manner - and we all know lefties repel logic like similar magnet poles repel each other.

          So I'm sorry and I love you but I'm not sending flowers.

          PS. I've got heap more tools than you. I've got my own car lift in the factory as well as starter motors on my V8s that have more power than your Toyota Prius. Grunt grunt grunt.

          Comment


          • Originally posted by astralis View Post
            GVChamp,



            different times we're talking about, though, especially with the 2004 example. two major black swan events temporarily scrambled existing political conventional wisdom (9-11, Iraq War).

            obviously the debate between the Sanders wing and the HRC wing of the Dems was primarily which group (poor/lower middle class/middle vs upper middle class) to focus on more, and which group can be, for lack of a better term, taken for granted.

            huge generalities of course, but ironically the Sanders wing probably has the better political argument, if not the actual solutions. (even more obvious caveat here of better political argument in 2016, with 2020 unknown-- those UMC urbanites whom blithely thought that anyone the Dems nominated would crush Trump had a rude wakeup call.) there's more voters in the first, and given the hard-lining of the GOP cultural war, there's fewer places for the second to run off to.



            would be more true under a Romney or Rubio administration, doubt it will be true for the foreseeable future. the "what's wrong with K
            There's usually a Black Swan of some sort or another. 2008 was a big year for Dems because of the financial crisis. 2016 had Trump, who was a Swan himself. Maybe 2012 didn't have anything.

            Anyways, I'm just saying that the GOP vote among the UMC/MC whites overperforms relative to stats like "what % of college grads identify as Dems," and the GOP still has majority vote in that demo. And also that the divisions within the Dems makes UMC whites that flip, weakly affiliated. They'll still be a swing demographic.

            The big stories, IMO, are how Asians and Hispanics will vote and whether their turnout number increases. Blacks and Whites have pretty similar high-turn out. Asians and Hispanics are both, like, 20 points below.
            "The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood"-Otto Von Bismarck

            Comment


            • GVChamp,

              Anyways, I'm just saying that the GOP vote among the UMC/MC whites overperforms relative to stats like "what % of college grads identify as Dems," and the GOP still has majority vote in that demo. And also that the divisions within the Dems makes UMC whites that flip, weakly affiliated. They'll still be a swing demographic.
              fair enough. i think my argument still holds, though: Trumpism will be a driver for UMC whites to flip to Dems.

              and if the poison stays around long enough, it will lead to long-term conversion: see the Asian swing from solid-Republican to solid-Dem in the 1990s-2000s.

              The big stories, IMO, are how Asians and Hispanics will vote and whether their turnout number increases.
              considering the trend lines, the answer seems to be "Dem" and "yes, but slowly". Dems have been pinning their hopes on Hispanics flipping Texas blue for a while now, but that probably won't be the case for at least another 3 Presidential elections.
              There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

              Comment


              • https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...cit-debt-fraud

                “The hypocrisy is astounding”: this tax bill shows the GOP’s debt concerns were pure fraud
                Republicans are proving themselves nihilists.

                Updated by Ezra Klein@ezraklein Dec 2, 2017, 1:55am EST

                There is a long-running, almost metaphysical, argument about the GOP’s deficit hawkery. One school of thought holds that it has always been pure cynicism. Republicans passed the Bush tax cuts without offsets and paid for neither Medicare Part D nor the Iraq War. When they began decrying the deficit and debt during President Obama’s administration, under this theory, it was nothing but opportunistic political attacks, and it was obvious they would be abandoned as soon as Republicans regained power.

                The response many Republicans gave was that the party had lost its way under George W. Bush, but it had recognized its mistakes and rediscovered its fiscally conservative soul. The Tea Party and its relentless campaign of primary challenges was proof the Republican Party had changed, and would stay changed.

                The House and Senate passage of the GOP tax bills shows the cynics had it right.

                In the Obama years, Republicans feared a debt crisis
                From 1993 to 2016, Charlie Sykes was a right-wing talk show host on WTMJ in Milwaukee. That made him a conservative eminence in Wisconsin, the home state of Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Ron Johnson. Sykes interviewed them dozens of times, emceed events at which they appeared, introduced them before screaming crowds. And in speech after speech, interview after interview, they delivered the same message: Debt was the country’s most pressing problem.

                “Ron Johnson used to joke about being the prince of darkness,” Sykes recalls. “Everywhere he would go he’d have these charts about the crisis posed by the debt. He became a notorious downer. He was so intense about it.”

                The same was true of Ryan, who became famous for his slick presentations on America’s coming fiscal crash. “The facts are very, very clear,” he says in this 2011 video, “the United States is headed towards a debt crisis.”

                “I’ll be honest with you,” Sykes continues. “I believed them. I considered myself a deficit hawk as a result.”

                Today, Paul Ryan is the speaker of the House of Representatives and Ron Johnson is a key vote in the Senate. Together, they are shepherding forward a tax bill that is expected to add more than a trillion dollars to the national debt in the first 10 years and, if their tax cuts are extended as they hope, far more after that. They are doing so despite years of arguing that the national debt is the most severe problem facing the United States, despite running for reelection promising balanced budgets and fiscal restraint.

                “The hypocrisy is astounding,” says Marc Goldwein, policy director at the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget.

                The wages of nihilism

                Since regaining power in January, congressional Republicans have embarked on a relentless campaign of proving themselves pure nihilists. The GOP spent the Obama years in a frenzy over debt and deficits. Now they are passing a tax bill that will add trillions to the national debt, complete with budget gimmicks that, if they play out the way Republicans are publicly hoping they will play out, will lead to an even higher price tag. That bill includes repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate without any replacement — a policy that will break Republican promises to stabilize insurance markets, lower premiums, and ensure more affordable and widespread health coverage.

                The nihilism extends to process too. Republicans complained bitterly during the Obama administration that Democrats weren’t holding enough hearings, that they weren’t leaving sufficient time to read final bill text, that they were passing important legislation on party-line votes, that they were using the budget reconciliation process improperly. Now they are passing sweeping tax reform through the budget reconciliation process with no hearings, no effort at bipartisan compromise, and bill text that was not made public until hours before the final vote. In a darkly comic twist, changes were handwritten into the legislation in the final hours:

                There is no framework under which these moves appear principled, no explanation under which the cynicism abates. Some Republicans have tried to argue that the tax bill will pay for itself through increased economic growth, but there is not a single economic analysis that agrees; the Joint Committee on Taxation, for instance, says the law will add a trillion dollars to the deficit even accounting for economic growth.

                Perhaps that is why even Paul Ryan sounds embarrassed making these claims. “I’m telling you that’s what I believe will happen. I’m not going to tell you I’m sure,” he said.

                Nihilism begets nihilism. Democrats feel like fools for taking Republican deficit concerns seriously, for trying to play by the rules and pay for their legislation and show they were acting in good faith.

                “Part of me feels like a sucker now,” says Jason Furman, who served as chief economist to President Obama. “Part of me feels a bit like the next time Democrats are in power they shouldn’t pay for anything and shouldn’t use Congressional Budget Office scores. I try to resist that mentality. I don’t think we should chase people down to the bottom of a toilet. But it seems an awful lot of people are comfortable at the bottom of a toilet.”

                This is what scares the real budget hawks — that a world in which Republicans have shown you can get away with not paying for anything, with completely ignoring the budget scorekeepers and the economic analyses, is a world in which Democrats will begin to think paying for their legislation is foolish too, and so both parties will become increasingly fiscally irresponsible.

                “If Republicans can spend a trillion and a half dollars on tax cuts and say, ‘Our own models tell us it will pay for itself,’ why can’t Democrats do Berniecare and say it’ll lead to huge growth?” asks Goldwein. “I hear really smart and really responsible Democrats saying things like, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have paid for the ACA.’”

                If there are congressional Republicans out there who aren’t pure nihilists, who really do worry about debt and process and the future of the country, they should think a bit harder about what they are unleashing. American politics is governed as much by norms as by rules, as much by expectations of what the other side will do to you as by beliefs about what’s right for you to do to the other side. They should imagine their process, their rules, their blithe dismissal of debt and deficits and arithmetic and process, applied to the vast suite of social democratic spending that today’s Democratic Party wants.
                They should imagine how tinny, how hypocritical, how cynical they will sound when they complain.
                There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

                Comment


                • Now we know GVChamp is Josh Barro, or at least Josh Barro has been taking GVChamp's ideas.

                  http://www.businessinsider.com/trump...ocrats-2017-11

                  The Republican tax plan creates big long-term opportunities for Democrats

                  Josh Barro

                  Nov. 30, 2017, 1:50 PM

                  The Republican tax bill isn't good policy.
                  But it provides Democrats with an opportunity the next time they're in power.
                  It would make changing the tax code to their liking easier than the status quo.

                  The tax bill making its way through Congress isn't good policy. But I've been increasingly thinking that it provides a better platform for Democrats to make good policy — the next time they run the government — than the tax policy status quo.

                  Essentially, you can break down this tax plan into three parts:

                  A corporate tax reform that isn't too bad in its structure, even if the rate is too low and it doesn't raise enough revenue.
                  Tax cuts for rich individuals that are substantively and politically indefensible, which Democrats can repeal (and then some) when they next run Washington.
                  Tax cuts for middle-income people that stealthily morph into tax increases over time.
                  Plus, the plan will balloon the budget deficit, creating a political argument for tax increases in the future.

                  Can you see why this might make a better starting point for the next Democratic tax plan than the tax policy status quo?

                  Because the GOP plan expands the base of taxable middle-class income, and because its tax cuts for the rich are so transparently indefensible, it will put Democrats in a better position in the future to argue for taxing the right things at the right rates — raising more revenue while preserving the smarter, growth-promoting parts of the Republican tax package.

                  Capital gains tax cuts are so 1990s
                  paul ryan
                  House Speaker Paul Ryan. Yuri Gripas/Reuters
                  Liberals occasionally talk about the unfairness of offering a lower tax rate for capital gains than for regular income. But this tax preference has been a feature of the American federal income tax for its entire history — except for a few years immediately following the Tax Reform Act of 1986 — and for a reason: Business income is taxed twice, and personal income is taxed only once.

                  But if corporate tax rates are much lower, the argument for a much-reduced capital gains tax rate is weaker. Republicans' corporate tax cut clears a path for Democrats to impose higher investor-side taxation on capital income the next time they run the government.

                  The tax plan also takes away many individual income tax deductions. Democrats have principled defenses of some of these deductions. But frankly, many of the deductions have never been good policy, and Republicans are doing the dirty work of repealing or shrinking them.

                  In the long run, funding Democrats' spending priorities will require higher taxes on the middle and upper-middle classes. Democrats cannot bring themselves to run on the idea of middle-class tax increases. Because the Republican plan imposes permanent tax increases on middle- and upper-middle-income Americans while allowing their tax cuts to expire, this plan lays the groundwork for such tax increases to happen automatically.

                  Finally, the most misguided provision of this Republican plan is probably the tax preference for income received through so-called pass-through businesses, like S-corporations and limited liability companies.

                  Owners of traditional corporations have an argument for why they should get preferential tax rates: They are taxed on their income twice. Owners of pass-through companies have no such argument — the companies are called that because their income is passed through, tax-free, to the human owners and then taxed only once, at the individual level. This provision is a pure giveaway to wealthy business owners like the Trump family.

                  For this reason, this provision is likely to prove wildly unpopular once people understand it, as happened with a similar one adopted a few years ago in Kansas. And it ought to be possible to eventually repeal the whole provision, as happened in Kansas.

                  Corporate tax cuts are better policy than capital gains tax cuts
                  U.S. President Donald Trump pumps his fist after speaking about tax reform legislation during a visit to St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. November 29, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
                  President Donald Trump. Thomson Reuters

                  The centerpiece of the Republican tax plan is its corporate tax cut.

                  Capital gains tax cuts, dividend tax cuts, and corporate tax cuts all mostly benefit owners of capital. But a capital gains or dividend tax cut is enjoyed narrowly by taxable owners of stock, while a corporate tax cut has better effects through the whole economy and most likely accrues in part to workers.

                  Middle- and upper-middle-income workers who have stock investments tend to hold them through 401(k) or IRA accounts. A capital gains tax cut doesn't do these people any good, because they were never going to have to pay capital gains tax on the balance in a tax-free account. But a corporate tax cut should tend to raise their account balances, and also raise the dividends they can expect to receive in the future.

                  Pension funds and endowed nonprofit institutions don't benefit from a capital gains tax cut, but a corporate tax cut makes their investments more valuable.

                  And a US capital gains tax cut does nothing for foreign investors in American companies, but a corporate tax cut makes investing in the US more attractive for them, which should boost economic growth.

                  Finally, while economists disagree widely on the fraction, most will tell you that some portion of the corporate income tax is borne by wages. The Joint Committee on Taxation uses an estimate that 25% of the corporate income tax is borne in the form of lower wages. The Urban Institute and Brookings Institution's Tax Policy Center, a centrist project of two left-leaning think tanks, estimates 20%.

                  This means, all things being equal, a corporate tax cut should tend to cause wages to rise a little bit, because a lower corporate tax rate makes the US a more attractive location to employ people.

                  None of this is to say I think a deficit-increasing corporate tax cut to 20% from 35% is good policy on its own. The need for the government to borrow more money tends to reduce economic growth, and might even wholly offset the economic benefits from the lower rate. And while a corporate tax cut is not as regressive as a capital gains and dividend tax cut, it is still regressive.

                  But a corporate tax cut combined with whatever Democrats do to the individual tax code next time they run the government could be progressive and growth-promoting at the same time.
                  There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

                  Comment


                  • The main problem with the Josh Barro / GVChamp article is that it makes the unsubstantiated assumption that Democrats are just dying to raise tax rates. This is one of those old GOPer lies along with “we’re the party of fiscal responsibility” and “Democrats start wars.”

                    It isn’t so much the tax rate as it is who pays how much of the total bill. If corporations with trillions sitting overseas would bring that money back onshore and put it to productive uses – i.e., invest it or pay dividends, rather than buying back their own stock – there wouldn’t be much need to raise tax rates on anyone. If loopholes such as the pass-through and all those partnership shenanigans were closed for good, there wouldn’t be any need for additional revenue.


                    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W006RC1Q027SBEA
                    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A074RC1Q027SBEA
                    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B075RC1Q027SBEA

                    Note: a lot of the "other" is import duties.
                    Attached Files
                    Trust me?
                    I'm an economist!

                    Comment


                    • The main problem with the Josh Barro / GVChamp article is that it makes the unsubstantiated assumption that Democrats are just dying to raise tax rates. This is one of those old GOPer lies along with “we’re the party of fiscal responsibility” and “Democrats start wars.”
                      to be fair, if anyone is concerned about the deficit at all then there will need to be some mild tax-raising in order. that's part of what makes this tax bill truly terrible; a truly conservative bill -could- have lowered corporate taxes, given some mild middle-class tax cuts, AND reduced the debt. i wouldn't mind lowering corporate taxes some...and then raising capital gains taxes, etc.

                      but obviously, that's not what happened, and it's unlikely to the extreme the final bill will be any better in this regards.

                      given how Republicans have shown pretty definitively that they care not a whit about the deficit, i would be completely fine with the Dems sticking it to the Republicans bigly-- say, on universal healthcare-- and then mocking them for their supposed care about the deficit.

                      after all, what was the most unpopular part about the ACA? the insurance mandate, which was the -fiscally responsible- part of the ACA.
                      There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

                      Comment


                      • Government consumption expenditure and gross investment in 2008-17 was 19.2% of GDP, as compared to 18.8% in the previous (1998-07) decade and 19.6% in the ten years before that (1988-97).

                        Of that, a mere 7.5% of GDP was federal; the other 11.6% was state and local. So, the amount of (federal) spending is not really out of control.

                        Spending as a Percent of GDP
                        _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 1988-97 _ _ 1998-07_ _ 2008-17*
                        Gov’t Cons, Invest _ _ _ _ 19.6% _ _ _ 18.8% _ _ _ 19.2%
                        Federal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 8.3_ _ _ _ _ 6.9 _ _ _ _ _ 7.5
                        State & Local _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 11.3 _ _ _ _ 11.9 _ _ _ _ 11.6

                        On the revenue side, income has risen within ½ of a percentage point of the pace of nominal GDP, sometimes faster sometimes more slowly.

                        Revenue as a Percent of GDP
                        _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 1988-97 _ _ 1998-07_ _ 2008-17*
                        Tax Receipts _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 19.7_ _ _ _ _19.8 _ _ _ _ 19.3
                        Personal taxes _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 9.9 _ _ _ _ 10.2 _ _ _ _ _ _ 9.8
                        Corporate taxes _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 2.5 _ _ _ _ _ 2.5 _ _ _ _ _ _2.4
                        Other taxes _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 2.6 _ _ _ _ _ 2.6 _ _ _ _ _ _2.5

                        Bear in mind that state governments take an extra $1 trillion out of the economy, of which 40.6% is from people and 5.1% from companies. The largest share is sales taxes (47.3%). And, local governments get an extra $700 billion, and about 70% of that is property taxes.

                        Source: https://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cf...survey&1903=98
                        * Through Q-3 2017
                        Trust me?
                        I'm an economist!

                        Comment


                        • https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/u...-estimate.html

                          Republicans Sought to Undercut an Unfavorable Analysis of the Tax Plan
                          By JIM TANKERSLEY

                          DEC. 4, 2017

                          As the Senate prepared to vote on its tax bill, Republican Senators criticized the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation over its analysis that the bill would increase the deficit by $1 trillion. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times
                          WASHINGTON — A Republican requirement that Congress consider the full cost of major legislation threatened to derail the party’s $1.5 trillion tax rewrite last week. So lawmakers went on the offensive to discredit the agency performing the analysis.

                          In 2015, Republicans changed the budget rules in Congress so that official scorekeepers would be required to analyze the potential economic impact of major legislation when determining how it would affect federal revenues.

                          But on Thursday, hours before they were set to vote on the largest tax cut Congress has considered in years, Senate Republicans opened an assault on that scorekeeper, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and its analysis, which showed the Senate plan would not, as lawmakers contended, pay for itself but would add $1 trillion to the federal budget deficit.

                          Public statements and messaging documents obtained by The New York Times show a concerted push by Republican lawmakers to discredit a nonpartisan agency they had long praised. Party leaders circulated two pages of “response points” that declared “the substance, timing and growth assumptions of J.C.T.’s ‘dynamic’ score are suspect.” Among their arguments was that the joint committee was using “consistently wrong” growth models to assess the effect the tax cuts would have on hiring, wages and investment.

                          The Republican response points go after revenue analyses by the committee and by the Congressional Budget Office, which scores other legislation, saying their findings “can be off to the tune of more than $1.5 trillion over ten years.”

                          The swift backlash helped defuse concerns about the deficit impact long enough for the bill to pass by a vote of 51 to 49. Some deficit hawks in the Senate caucus were sufficiently concerned about the report on Thursday night to delay the tax vote by a day, but the only Republican lawmaker to vote no was Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, whose last-minute efforts to cut the size of the package or otherwise offset the deficit impact were unsuccessful.

                          Instead, Senate Republicans questioned the timing of the analysis’ release on Thursday, and a spokeswoman for the Senate Finance Committee released a statement saying the findings are “curious and deserve further scrutiny.”

                          That sentiment was repeated over and over, before and after the vote. “We think they lowballed it,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the majority whip, told reporters on Thursday. On Sunday, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said on CNN that “there’s no doubt that the J.C.T. has been consistently underestimating the activity in our economy.”

                          In the final hours before and after the bill passed, party leaders insisted that the tax plan would produce enough economic growth to pay for themselves with additional tax revenue from growing businesses and higher-paid workers. “I’m totally confident this is a revenue-neutral bill,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, told reporters early Saturday morning after the vote. “Actually a revenue producer.”

                          Yet there was no data to support those claims, despite promises by the Trump administration that such an analysis would be forthcoming. The Treasury, whose secretary, Steven Mnuchin, has said repeatedly that his department was working on an analysis to show how the tax cuts would not add to the deficit, has not produced any studies that back up those claims. Last week, the Treasury’s inspector general said it was opening an inquiry into the department’s analysis of the tax plan.

                          The attack on the joint committee and its analysis is a change from the praise Republicans have long heaped on the body, which is staffed with economists and other career bureaucrats who analyze legislation in depth.

                          “The people who prepare our cost estimates are the best in the business,” Republicans on the House Budget Committee said on a page that has since been removed from their website, “and they’ve been working on this issue for years.”

                          The critique is the latest example of Republican lawmakers muddying the waters on empirical research in an effort to boost their policy agendas. During the debate over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, lawmakers lashed out preemptively at the Congressional Budget Office over how many people would lose health insurance.

                          At stake in the debate is more than the reputation of the economic analysts whose lifeblood is understanding the vagaries and intersections of the federal budget and tax code.

                          If Republicans are wrong and the joint committee is correct, the tax bill will add to an already worsening fiscal forecast in the United States. The federal government is already running an annual deficit of nearly $700 billion. The amount of federal debt has surpassed $20 trillion, and it is projected to grow by another $10 trillion over the next decade as government safety net spending rises because of retiring baby boomers and increasing health care costs.

                          The joint committee did find that the tax bill would rev up economic growth but, like other studies, it found that growth would not be enough to offset the loss of tax revenue. The analysis found that economic growth would be enough to offset $468 billion in lost revenue. However, $51 billion of that would be eaten up by additional interest costs on money the United States would need to borrow to pay for the plan, leaving just $407 billion to offset a nearly $1.5 trillion tax cut.

                          Other independent analyses echo the joint committee’s findings. The Tax Foundation, which tends to find high growth effects from tax cuts, projected the House version of the tax bill would increase deficits by about $1 trillion after factoring in economic growth. The Tax Policy Center, which tends to find much smaller effects, estimated the deficit increase at nearly $1.5 trillion. So did the Penn Wharton Budget Model, which is run by a former Bush administration economist, Kent A. Smetters.

                          Both the Penn model and the Tax Policy Center’s model found the Senate version would increase deficits by more than $1 trillion after accounting for growth; the Penn model in particular produced a near-identical score to the joint committee’s. The Tax Foundation did not complete an analysis of the Senate bill as amended in committee, when senators made several large changes to the bill including sunsetting its tax cuts for individuals in 2025.

                          Until Thursday, though, Republicans could dismiss those findings by pointing to the lack of analysis from the joint committee. The House bill was passed two weeks after it was introduced, before the committee could issue a so-called dynamic score of the bill, one that estimates the legislation’s cost in light of its effect on the economy. When the Senate analysis was finally released, Republicans, who pushed the bill through Congress at such lightening-fast speed that the final bill had handwritten changes in the margins, questioned the timing.

                          “How is it,” they wrote in their response points, “that J.C.T. found the time to produce and make public its macroeconomic analysis of the Senate bill, when it has yet to produce the same analysis of the House bill that passed weeks ago.”

                          In a November 28 email shared with The New York Times, the committee’s chief of staff, Thomas A. Barthold, said the committee had suspended its work on the House bill dynamic score in hopes of producing an analysis of the Senate bill before a final vote.

                          Looking at the calendar, Mr. Barthold wrote, “I made the decision to have my macro colleagues devote their time to producing a macroeconomic estimate of the Finance bill in time for the Finance Committee’s report (in this we failed) or in time for the Senate’s debate on the legislation. My colleagues and I reasoned that we could then return to complete work on H.R. 1” — the House bill — “and with good fortune have the two analyses available for a potential conference.”

                          The blowback came, in part, from lingering anger over unfavorable analyses of Republican health care plans by the budget office earlier this year, according to a Republican Senate aide. A finding that contradicted their philosophical belief that tax cuts will generate significant growth and revenues inflamed their suspicions.

                          Instead, they found comfort in ballpark estimates offered by some conservative economists, that the tax bill could increase the size of the economy by as much as 4 percent over a decade, or 0.4 percent a year. Mr. Smetters, of Penn, said that number is actually much higher — that the economy would need to grow by at least an additional 0.57 percent a year for tax cuts to pay for themselves.

                          Not even the most optimistic analysis of the Senate bill projected it would unleash anywhere close to that rate of additional growth.
                          There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

                          Comment


                          • I have lost any faith in American conservatism. From what I have heard they are mostly just a bunch of self interested crooks.

                            Comment


                            • Asty:

                              The WaPo article correctly states that in "2015, Republicans changed the budget rules in Congress so that official scorekeepers would be required to analyze the potential economic impact of major legislation when determining how it would affect federal revenues."

                              But in taking issue with some Republicans who disagree with the committee's analysis of the GOP tax bill, the WaPo implies that requiring an analysis also means accepting it.

                              No budget forecast is infallible, no matter how non-partisan it is. They are useful, but accurate ones are rare and some are wildly inaccurate, as this study found:

                              Errors in Budget Forecasting

                              Between 1980 and 1991, economic and technical errors caused actual outlays to exceed
                              forecast outlays in all but 2 of the 12 years. Between 1992 and 2000, actual out-
                              lays fell short of the forecast in every year.

                              The examples described above imply that outlay and receipts forecasting
                              errors reinforced each other in creating the serial correlation in the errors in the
                              budget forecast. Although receipts and outlay errors were, on average, of similar
                              relative importance between 1980 and 2000, very large errors in predicting
                              receipts were the main reason for the surprising emergence of the surplus in

                              1998. Large errors occurred both because GDP growth was understated and
                              because revenues rose unexpectedly as a share of GDP
                              (bold added). The unpredicted rise in
                              the stock market led to a surge in revenues from capital gains taxation, and a rapid
                              rise in the share of income earned by the very rich raised the average individual
                              tax rate. The corporate profit share of GDP also exceeded CBO’s expectations and
                              added to corporate tax collections.

                              The five-year projections of receipts and outlays show similar patterns, in that
                              forecasts tend to be persistently optimistic early in the period and persistently
                              pessimistic later. The errors, of course, grow as the forecast period lengthens.
                              These longer-run forecasts will not be examined in detail here. The long-run
                              errors in receipts and outlay projections manifest themselves in the very large
                              errors discussed above for five-year projections of the budget balance.

                              https://www.urban.org/sites/default/...orecasting.PDF (page 6)
                              The point here is that the longer the period covered in an analysis, the greater likelihood of error.

                              Personally, I take no sides in the debate over the committee's analysis. I think the tax plan will boost the debt, but by less than the committee projects. This is not because the committee made any egregious errors, but that it assumes that GDP will be in line with recent years.
                              To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

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                              • JAD,

                                The point here is that the longer the period covered in an analysis, the greater likelihood of error.

                                Personally, I take no sides in the debate over the committee's analysis. I think the tax plan will boost the debt, but by less than the committee projects. This is not because the committee made any egregious errors, but that it assumes that GDP will be in line with recent years.
                                sure...but the JCT analysis is not an outlier. the CBO and pretty much every other independent analysis says the same thing, so the issue is not in doubt.

                                even WITH dynamic...very dynamic...scoring, the debt will go up significantly. and that's under the assumption that the middle-class tax cuts in the bill expire, which the GOP is now promising up and down that it won't.

                                the GOP response is not even silence, but to attack every analysis and the institution that made them.

                                i mean, i suppose we could discover fusion power next year and suddenly the US economy goes gangbusters, but that's certainly not something that can be built into a budgetary model.
                                Last edited by astralis; 05 Dec 17,, 04:33.
                                There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

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