The Trump Fog Machine

The Trump Fog Machine erased all his Tweets supporting the other guy in Alabama. No need for that. We do it for him, by following the fresh distractions. Trump is not Teflon. Things do stick to him. But he survives by saying or doing something so outrageous, so regularly, that we forget the last atrocity, and turn on one another.

.. So, this week his cabinet official charged with taking away health care from the poor and cutting the budget for cancer research is using our money to fly private planes at his pleasure. The multimillionaire treasury secretary wanted the same perk for his honeymoon.

.. He’s already tweeted the word “loser” 234 times, “incompetent” 92 times and “pathetic” 72 times. Call them projection tweets, showing the man for what he truly is.

..  He’s already lied about whether his tax plan will benefit the rich and his own family. It will, by eliminating the estate tax, and ensuring that the top 1 percent will get nearly 50 percent of the windfall.

Study: Blacks’ Median Wealth Will Be Zero in 2053

That racial stereotyping hides the real cause and scale of economic damage to blue-collar and white-collar Americans families amid the rising wealth of the technocratic globalized elite which dominates the Democratic Party and at least half of the GOP.

.. That government failure is exemplified by the housing bubble, which destroyed a huge percentage of wealth held by black Americans.

2011 report by the Pew Research Center showed that the median wealth of black American households dropped by 53 percent because of the property bubble. The mid-point median of black American wealth crashed from $12,124 in 2005 to just $5,677 in 2009, according to the Pew report.

.. White Americans suffered far less from the bubble because many had already paid off their mortgages, because their debts were a small percentage of their income, and because whites had more assets in the stock market and other sectors outside the housing market. Still, the median wealth of white households also dropped by a huge 16 percent, from $134,992 in 2005 to $113,149 in 2009.

.. Meanwhile, wages for all men have remained flat for the past 44 years since 1973, according to the Census Bureau.

.. when Obama settled into the White House during the housing implosion, his economic policies helped very clever people invest their way back up to more wealth. The New York Post described the process:

The years 2008 through 2015 should be known as the Great Fleecing.

During that time, the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world occurred. Some $4.5 trillion was given to Wall Street banks through its Quantitative Easing program, with the American people picking up the IOU … Who did this help? The 1%, and pretty much only the 1%.

.. The report does not discuss how technology is concentrating wealth among higher-skilled people, and it omits any talk of globalized outsourcing. It also avoids family stability and it ignores the topic of immigration, which has flooded the nation’s marketplace with cheap labor that effectively imposes a 5 percent tax on labor — and then transfers $500 billion a year to company owners and investors.

.. the report then lists a series of unrealistic demands, including a massive tax increase on the wealthy, a massive financial grant to children that could be spent when they become adults, more house-buying aid for poor people, a higher minimum wage, and “a federal jobs guarantee [that] would function similarly to the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s.”

.. But many people of all colors who cannot get through college are falling behind because technology, work, and business are becoming more complex. This increasing complexity ensures that an increasing share of income and wealth goes to people who are smart enough to arbitrage the increasing social and technological diversity, regardless of color.

 .. the Democratic elite prefers to import foreign voters rather than accept the equal social status of all blue-collar Americans.
.. four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs. However, the government imports roughly 1 million legal immigrants to compete against Americans for jobs.
.. That Washington-imposed policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign laborspikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate priceswidens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

Tax Reform for the Rich: Reduce the Rates but Lose the Breaks

The top 1 percent seems a fair representation of the rich. This group — about 1.4 million taxpayers — reported adjusted gross incomes of over $466,000 in 2014, the most recent year for which the data is available.

.. The top 1 percent paid a total of $542.6 billion in federal tax, or an astounding 39.5 percent of the total income tax. If you want to take a more expansive view of rich, the top 10 percent (who earn upward of $133,000) pay 71 percent of the total tax.

Do they pay the top rate? Not by a long shot. The average rate for the top 1 percent is 27 percent of their adjusted gross income. (It’s even lower — 24 percent — for the superrich in the 0.001 percent bracket.) The top 10 percent pay an average of 21 percent.

.. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the 10 largest tax expenditures (its term for what most people consider tax breaks) would amount to $12 trillion, or 5.4 percent of gross domestic product, over the decade from 2014 to 2023.

.. The top 1 percent gave $77 billion in 2014, 37 percent of total charitable contribution deductions

.. Why should capital income be taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income? Capital assets are owned overwhelmingly by the rich. The top 1 percent reported $561 billion in capital gains taxed at the preferential rate, or 68 percent of the total. As a simple matter of math, the rich will never pay anything close to the top statutory rate as long so much of their income is taxed at a much lower rate (currently 20 percent for the top bracket, not counting the Affordable Care Act surcharge of 3.8 percent).

.. This path would require Republicans to set aside a long-held belief that lower capital-gains rates promote more economic growth and investment

Four Rules for the Coming Tax Reform Debate

True reform will require a bipartisan consensus around closing loopholes to pay for the lowering of statutory tax rates paid by businesses, and reducing burdens on working families. Changing tax law must be done in a fiscally responsible way, without cutting taxes for the very wealthy.

First, changes in the tax rates for individuals must at least maintain the current levels of progressivity

  1. Cutting tax rates for the very wealthy would deepen the income inequality that underlies the anxiety and anger among American voters. If Congress doesn’t preserve or increase progressivity, we won’t have the resources to pay for investments like infrastructure and child care.
    • .. Congress must also maintain the estate tax, which is levied only on estates worth more than $5.49 million ($10.98 million for a couple), affects only the wealthiest 0.2 percent and protects small businesses, including family farmers.
    • .. Many of the estates that are taxed have assets that have increased in value but have never been subject to capital gains tax, and never will be. The idea that the estate tax imposes double taxation is largely a myth.
  2. Second, tax cuts must be offset by revenue-raising measures. With the country in the ninth year of an economic recovery, the case for pure stimulus is weak, and digging a deep hole of debt by cutting taxes will make it harder to pay for other priorities.
    • Tax cuts need to be revenue neutral, paid for by reducing tax subsidies, ending loopholes or generating new revenue.
  3. Third, Congress should rely on its Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office to estimate what a tax bill will cost.
    1. Claims that tax cuts pay for themselves must be treated with great skepticism.
    2. Such a reckless move would almost surely produce an explosion of debt. In 1981, 2001 and 2003, tax cuts based on projections that they would largely pay for themselves did not, and when deficits soared, future presidents had to make hard choices to restore fiscal stability.
  4. Fourth, business tax reform must not open up new loopholes for top earners to evade taxes. Proposals to lower the tax rate on “pass-through” income (income that partnerships, sole proprietorships, S corporations and limited-liability companies “pass through” to owners) would create a costly, unpoliceable loophole. Wealthy individuals and businesses could easily reorganize on paper to take advantage of low pass-through rates.
    1. most pass-through income goes to wealthy individuals and big businesses like hedge funds and large oil and gas pipeline companies organized as limited partnerships.
    2. Kansas instituted a similar policy in 2012 and repealed it this year after 100,000 new pass-throughs emerged — among them the coach of the University of Kansas basketball team, who had his salary paid to a pass-through entity to escape state income tax. Yet job and economic growth in Kansas lagged that of most neighboring states, evidence that the policy did not produce the growth that supporters promised