After this tax bill, I never want to hear a thing about fiscal responsibility again.
- Thread starter DrHoops
- Start date
A clear implication is an oxymoron. What is clear is the plain meaning of what I said.
Can you point to some actual, verified quotes of Fox or Limbaugh or....anybody...using the term "entitlement" as a pejorative? You're the third or fourth person to suggest that these people made it a dirty word. The guy I linked did the same thing.
What haven't any of you done? Oh yeah, given actual examples. As I said earlier, I can't remember a single instance of somebody using the word "entitlement" in such a way. What I frequently see is people complaining about the word being used properly.
Your wish is my command. Took me all of about three nanoseconds to do something you're perfectly capable of doing.
An entitlement is a guarantee of access to benefits based on established rights or by legislation. A “right” is itself an entitlement associated with a moral or social principle, such that an “entitlement” is a provision made in accordance with legal framework of a society. Typically, entitlements are laws based on concepts of principle (“rights”) which are themselves based in concepts of social equality or enfranchisement.
In a casual sense, the term “entitlement” refers to a notion or belief that one (or oneself) is deserving of some particular reward or benefit—if given without deeper legal or principled cause, the term is often given with pejorative connotation (e.g. a “sense of entitlement”).
Furthermore, several here are knowing and using the pejorative definition for purposes of discussion, also demonstrating that it exists. I truly, truly, truly don't believe you when you say you're not familiar with it. You of all people here, who talk about how liberals would behave just the same now about Clinton's blowjob as then, yada yada yada. Get real, Crazed.In a casual sense, the term “entitlement” refers to a notion or belief that one (or oneself) is deserving of some particular reward or benefit—if given without deeper legal or principled cause, the term is often given with pejorative connotation (e.g. a “sense of entitlement”).
Just because some of the less-informed among us often hear it as a pejorative doesn't mean it was used that way.
So, wait, Rick Hertzberg is the person who gave entitlement a bad name? He's just doing the same thing you're doing.
What I'm looking for is a quote from Rush or Fox. That's who has turned the word into a pejorative, I'm told. That's why all these liberals don't seem to know what it means.
lol
It is used as it is used and that's up to the user, regardless of how informed anyone in the communication cycle is. Whether you're familiar with its pejorative usage or not doesn't mean that 99% of conservative politicians and political commentators don't use it that way. Who knows? You'd have to ask each and every one and get them to tell the truth to know for sure, wouldn't you?
You said "or anyone." Now you're changing the goal posts. Guess what, Crazed, who gives a flying F in a rolling donut about your pivots and dodges?
Next you're going to demand we prove that conservatives ever lie.
Also, I'm not talking about a "sense of entitlement." I'm talking about the legal term, as (properly) used to describe SS and Medicare. That's what got this whole thing started. That's the form I used the term that sent SHF off. That's the form that I linked to a Q & A about.
So, when I ask for an example, you link a New Yorker piece from liberal writer Rick Hertzberg.
That's telling, doncha think?
Well, I'm not asking for your help, Goat.
But I just think it's stupid to blame ignorance on people other than the ignorant. There are a lot of SHF's out there. They really have no idea that SS and Medicare are entitlements. We should disabuse them of their ignorance and leave it at that.
No, it's predictable from you that you'd shoot the messenger. He quoted Wiki. No one lies, right, Crazed? No conservative politicians have ever lied. None has ever been disingenuous. None has ever said something pejorative, derogatory, inflammatory, or otherwise painted their opponents in anything other than statesmanlike light, right?
Got it.
It also isn't an example of Fox or Rush misusing the legal term "entitlement" in a pejorative sense.
Just because there's such a thing as a "sense of entitlement" doesn't mean that SS and Medicare aren't properly called "entitlements."
I didn't say that.
What I said is that they aren't the reasons a whole bunch of misinformed liberals get pissed when SS and Medicare are properly called entitlements.
TOP DEFINITION
entitlement
someone who thinks something is owed to them by life in general; or because they are who they are
I had a friend who would never work on her birthday, and throw hissy fits when things didn't go her way- what a brat- had a huge sense of entitlement
#obnoxious#shit talker#whiner#brat#ridiculous
by Meadow Soprano October 22, 2005
entitlement
someone who thinks something is owed to them by life in general; or because they are who they are
I had a friend who would never work on her birthday, and throw hissy fits when things didn't go her way- what a brat- had a huge sense of entitlement
#obnoxious#shit talker#whiner#brat#ridiculous
by Meadow Soprano October 22, 2005
Note the date. Nothing new.
Give me one single example of when "misinformed liberals get pissed when SS and Medicare are properly called entitlements."
The example requires proof that the term entitlement was "properly" used, by which I assume you mean in its legal sense, as opposed to conservative demagogues, for whom the "proper" usage is its pejorative sense.
The only ignorance is you pretending there is only one definition of the word.
I'm no expert in the use of the pejorative snowflake but it sure seems like it would apply to those who believe their comrades are chaste as the driven snow when it comes to their legal, proper, and naively sincere use of the term entitlement in their unceasing devotion to the greatest good for the greatest number of Americans and balancing the budget, erasing the debt and equilibrating the income and wealth disparity by ensuring efficient and effective entitlement statutes and implementation and execution thereof.
Wait, that’s our special word. Don’t start using it with someone else. I’m sort of happy you got to use it again. I can’t wait to see what your next word of the month will be.
It’s ok, it gives him an excuse to not follow me around the forum. Fans are important.
This is what you get when a guy who fundamentally doesn't know what he's talking about wanders the internet in search of people saying something that seems to support his blinkered misconceptions: (1) an analysis that supports the mainstream view I espouse; (2) a link that says institutions own a lot of Apple stock; and (3) argle bargle from two wingnuts who don't deny that Republican tax cuts (including this one) effect upward redistributions of income. Notably, none of this proves me wrong. It does, however, underscore that you fundamentally don't know what you're talking about. I will stand with the Congressional Budget Office, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and the Tax Policy Center, rather than The World According to CO. Hoosier.
So you do still claim that rising income inequality results from social dysfunction among the poor. At this stage of the debate, that's just stupid. As I've pointlessly explained to you many times, if that were the cause of rising income inequality, we'd see incomes at the bottom falling away from everyone else. Instead we see incomes at the top soaring away from everyone else. Whatever is causing income inequality to rise, we know that it unequivocally isn't caused by increasing social dysfunction among the poor. You stubbornly claim otherwise, even though the data unambiguously refute your claim.
Let me ask you a serious question: Why should anyone take you seriously?
You're engaging a contrarian
although you've neither asked nor paid for such services. Once you've come to realize his function here, you're knowingly engaging him as Mary, Mary, Miss Contrary, and his contradictions, vacuities, dead ends, sophistry, and the rest are what you've asked for. No real reason to be surprised, frustrated or disappointed.
As far as tax rate goes, the top 1% has not been doing too bad before this tax bill (CNBC):
The CBO said that the average federal income tax rate paid by the top 1 percent has also dropped since 1979—falling from 22.7 percent in 1979 to 20.3 percent in 2011.
I will be curious to see the rate after.
Much of the remaining argument, that we all profit in our retirement accounts, reminds me of Milo's Syndicate in Catch-22. Sure, selling our parachutes for a profit helps everyone, unless your plane is hit and you have to use a parachute.
First, there is no question that the Internal Revenue Code is more progressive with the reform than it was before with progressiveness being measured by the taxes paid by the various income groups. The bottom 80% of tax payers currently pay 33% of the taxes but get 35% of the cuts. The top 1% pays 27% of the taxes and gets 21% of the cuts. The statistics you and others cite attempting to prove the opposite are comparing each group's before and after burden. Those statistics look like the rich are getting a bigger benefit only because the numbers are bigger. 1% of a higher income category will always look bigger than a 2% of a lower income category. Those statistics only show how progressive the system is now.
"As I've pointlessly explained to you many times, if that were the cause of rising income inequality, we'd see incomes at the bottom falling away from everyone else. Instead we see incomes at the top soaring away from everyone else." This has always been a deeply flawed argument. The reason is simple. The lower end has a hard barrier of zero. The upper end has no limit. Incomes can't go below a certain amount. Upper incomes can increase forever. The issue really is the numbers of people trapped in the lower end; this is a question of income mobility. Social forces have made mobility more difficult. In addition to the social conditions I have have repeatedly mentioned as mobility barriers, is parental income and wealth. That is a factor of the offspring's income and wealth. As more and more people become trapped in the lower strata, the more people will be trapped there.
A link for you. The money quote:
"The taxation and income-redistribution strategies favored by liberals such as Edelman may help to paper over the skill and productivity problem by increasing post-tax and transfer income for Americans at the bottom (albeit at the cost of discouraging work and slowing job creation). But redistribution does nothing to address the low productivity and work-participation rates that are keeping low-income Americans poor. The problem we face, in other words, is not one of inadequate equality, but one of inadequate mobility. And addressing that problem requires us to think differently about the sources of wealth and poverty in America."
Income and wealth distribution follows various pathways, including all the social characteristics I mentioned. If you think you can fix all the inequality factors with tax law changes, you are dreaming. That won't even make a dent.
So, if the statistics that Rock provides are accurate and your analysis is correct, this must mean that only the top 1% are appropriately educated, married, and productive because their incomes are leaving everyone else in the dust. Is your argument really that everyone other than the top 1% is subject to social dysfunction?
Someone keeps deleting my substantive responses to CO. Hoosier's bullshit. I'll repeat (as best I can) what I said in the last deleted post.
_______________________________________________
You're posting bullshit again. Let me explain.
The link in your first sentence refutes the claim that sentence makes. It's a Tax Policy Center analysis that directly supports what I say and contradicts your bogus claim:
The Tax Policy Center has released distributional estimates of this legislation. We find the following:
So, ordinary people get a small temporary tax cut, wealthy people get a large permanent tax cut, and income inequality increases -- just as I said.- Compared to current law, taxes would fall for all income groups on average in 2018, increasing overall average after-tax income by 2.2 percent. In general, tax cuts as a percentage of after-tax income would be larger for higher-income groups, with the largest cuts as a share of income going to taxpayers in the 95th to 99th percentiles of the income distribution.
- The pattern of tax changes across income groups would be similar in 2025 (the last year before nearly all the individual provisions sunset) although the magnitude of average tax decreases would be slightly smaller for most income groups.
- In 2027, the overall tax reduction would be just 0.2 percent of after-tax income. On average, relative to current law, low- and middle-income taxpayers would see little change and taxpayers in the top 1 percent would receive an average tax cut of 0.9 percent of after-tax income.
- Some taxpayers would pay more in taxes under the proposal in 2018 and 2025 than under current law: about 5 percent of taxpayers in 2018 and 9 percent in 2025. In 2027, however, taxes would increase for 53 percent of taxpayers compared with current law.
Noting that you'd inexplicably linked a TPC report for the exact opposite of what it says, I wondered where you conjured up the numeric claims in the second two sentences. They aren't in the TPC report -- and can't even be arithmetically derived from it -- so I knew they came from somewhere else.
So I Googled your claim, which led me straight to this piece of shit from Townhall.com. It claims to rebut the TPC analysis, but it doesn't even engage that analysis. Instead, it lies about what the TPC report says. Wingnuts can't even be bothered to pony up phony analytics, so they just flat lie about what reputable organizations say. And that, of course, is good enough for CO. Hoosier.
I don't know what motivates you to post this bullshit. You must have seen the Townhall.com piece, which lied about the TPC report, then to avoid acknowledging your shitty source, you linked the TPC report instead -- oblivious that it explodes your argument. In any event, having cleared out all that bullshit from just three sentences of your post, I decided that the rest of it wasn't worth the effort.
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If the sunsetting v. permanent thing is such a big deal, why doesn't the Senate just hold a vote on an amendment to make all the cuts in the TCJA permanent? See who votes to make them permanent....and who votes to keep them temporary.
Problem solved.
In order to clear the Byrd rule, yes. But now that the bill's signed into law, there's nothing stopping them from holding a vote -- one not subject to reconciliation, and thus requiring 60 votes to invoke cloture -- on an amendment to make all the cuts in the new law permanent.
Thing is: this is all a complete charade, anyway. Having a vote on making them permanent would be a charade, even if it passed. Why? Well, because the chances of the tax code making it to the sunset date without changes of one kind or another being made are probably pretty slim.
But, if it really is something the pols need to get sorted out, they should just draw up new legislation amending the recently enacted TCJA.
That is exactly the case. They had to make them expire after eight years to get the additional deficit spending under $1.5T over ten years, per the Byrd rule, allowing the bill to pass under budget reconciliation with a simple majority.
Same thing happened with the GWB tax cuts, which were later made permanent by a later Congress (and signed by BHO). There's no question it will play out similarly down the line.
From what I can gather, the tax bill as passed did result in tax breaks for nearly all. One can argue that the wealthy got more than the less well off, but the wealthy pay much more to begin with so that's to be expected.
What I find concerning is the refusal to even acknowledge the hit this bill puts on the debt at a time when the economy is growing at a fast clip and the proper action would have been to increase revenue and attack the debt. What it does instead is give Ryan more ammunition to attack the spending side of the equation, and we all know it will be the less fortunate that pay that price.
So yeah, it looks like I'll be getting a few extra dollars in my paycheck come February. But in another three years what I will be able to expect from Social Security and/or Medicare may be less. I doubt I'll be coming out ahead.
Exactly. It just goes to show how much of what we see and hear from politicians is manufactured nonsense. It's acting, under the pretense of governing.
Well, yeah. The whole "you can't squeeze blood from a turnip" maxim does indeed work both ways.
Quite honestly, the centerpiece of this legislation -- and its raison d'etre -- is the corporate tax cut. Everything else is either window dressing or there for political reasons. And there are very, very good arguments for lowering the corporate income tax rate. It comes as no surprise to me that other countries are concerned about what this might mean for them. It's one thing for some island tax haven to drop its corporate taxes....it's quite another when the world's largest economy does it.
It should result in some significant capital flows coming this way. And that, anyway, is something we should all celebrate.
But...
This is the most salient argument against the bill. And it's not just the cyclical timing of it, but the fact that it adds yet more debt to a growing (and unsustainable) pile that our lawmakers have long, long known about but refused to do anything about.
We're crossing that long foreseen "flip" period where SS will pay out more than it takes in. The good news is that it has a Trust Fund that will sustain it another couple decades. The bad news is that the fund consists of bonds owed by the General Fund. That, more than anything else, is why we're seeing expectations of deficit growth again...even as it's apparent that the economy is growing at a reasonable rate.
The first order of business should've been to tackle spending. If they don't want to jump on the political tightrope of entitlement reform, then at least get the ball rolling on the discretionary side of the budget. But, eventually, they're going to have to do something about the major entitlements -- which virtually everybody has been saying since at least the SOTU speech where Clinton said "Save Social Security First." That was almost 20 years ago.
But, at the very least, any tax reform bill they did -- because there are parts of it I welcome (like the corporate rate cut) -- should've been revenue neutral. It wasn't and, you're right, this is its fatal flaw....not that it screws the middle class in order to benefit the rich.
No.
Nuance isn’t your strength either. We are talking about factors that increase your chances of living below the poverty line. The opposite of that will not put you in the top 1%.
Living below the poverty line is irrelevant to this entire discussion. Nobody that poor is paying income taxes....either before or after this bill.
I agree with you that alerting tax rates slightly one way or another also has an irrelevant impact on income disparities. It's likely necessary to increase cap gains and dividend rates (or perhaps make them more progressive) in light of this new bill. We shall see if that occurs in coming years.
The driver income/wealth gaps is much more tied to automation and the continually decreasing need for "labor" as it was long defined.
It will become relevant to those below the poverty line if Medicaid and other programs are cut in order to deal with deficits resulting from the "tax reform".
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