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Thread: The OT thread V1

  1. #2641
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    The Smart Mag and Magic Box generally didn't do much to help the overall performance. It would be far easier to adjust the supply reg to a higher output or to just get an 850 psi reg. Those are easy enough to do instead of the Magic Box mod. Which is a brass tube and cap mounted to a drilled hole in the side of the dump chamber body, with a fancy metal cover. It did affect efficiency (worse) and recharge rate went down.



    You don't really short stroke so much, like in a cocker, due to the design. You can overshoot the regulator, and that was common before HPA.
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  2. #2642
    Should have been a little more clearer on the short stroking bit.

    Mags are fun, one of the last fun guns around. But personal likes and dislikes are well, personal. Shoot it and see where you are with it. I will say that it fires very similarly to an Axe, so it will have a little familiarity therein way of feel.

  3. #2643
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    Quote Originally Posted by pbjosh View Post
    The Smart Mag and Magic Box generally didn't do much to help the overall performance. It would be far easier to adjust the supply reg to a higher output or to just get an 850 psi reg. Those are easy enough to do instead of the Magic Box mod. Which is a brass tube and cap mounted to a drilled hole in the side of the dump chamber body, with a fancy metal cover. It did affect efficiency (worse) and recharge rate went down.
    Yeah it was mostly just marketing hype from SP. They had all those claims like the ones in that pic you posted that didn't have any real world basis.
    But, some of them did operate in lower input pressure than most normal classic mags. I had a teammate that could run his around 550-600 psi (granted that gauges we were using probably weren't that accurate).

  4. #2644
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    Steve:

    So much of that reply is so completely wrong it is mind blowing.

    Your assumptions of what the GOP wants and likes, their motivations are so completely without any insight, any personal knowledge of the other side it basically screams "I don't know what I am talking about on this subject, but I hate them anyways."

    It says, also, that you don't have the ability to comprehend or understand anything outside of your bias. That rigid level of ideology makes a great brainwashed patient, as in, nailed it 100%. You seem to have no ability for critical thought.

    I suggest and hazard that in counter to your commentary, you do have it, even if your statements seems counter to that position. Maybe you can exist beyond the mild ability to ignore and be blind to any counter position, like Gordon, or maybe you can't. But lets take one point I get to make very often on the interwebs and see how your brain can handle it. Maybe you can at least lift yourself to an Ad Hom Fallacy, which would at least eclipse Gordon's really piss poor listening skills.

    Lets kill this little stupid comment right here:

    But, like you, do you know what they fail to mention? Every. Single. Time? Fox news screams bloody murder about entitlement culture and the damn poors ruining the budget, yet they never mention all the tax subsidies that go to the middle class and above.
    First, thank you for letting me what Fox news fails to mention, I didn't know you were an expert. Especially since I don't keep up with their low information, basic rhetoric new casts (nor listen to Rush Limbaugh for the same reason. It is like Seinfeld for conservatives.)

    Okay, first point. The US has the most progressive tax structure in the world. It in fact incorporates a Negative Tax structure, as proposed by Milton Friedman actually. With all of the benefits kicks in, that means those on the lower end of the tax structure not only have the smallest tax, they get money back. This is exampled in Child Tax Credits, EIC, and Standard Deductions.

    In every socialized nation in Europe, the poor still pay a net tax. The lower middle class still pay a net tax. In Canada they do also. It is the VAT. everybody pays. If we get a VAT, guess what, the poor will pay more in taxes.

    In the US, they get money back instead.

    So as, the end result, if you look at the financial class of people as the US government does, it breaks it up into 5 sections, or Quintiles.

    Here is the CBO numbers before items like the EIC are put in:

    https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/fi...mefedtaxes.pdf

    You can see by the chart at the top that the only areas that pay a substantial tax are the upper two quintiles. For example, the upper quintile receives 53% of the economy, and pay 69% of the taxes. Where as the lower Quintile makes 9% of the income, but pays 1% of the taxes.

    But that, again, is before you look at the wealth re-distribution of the US Government.

    http://www.heritage.org/taxes/report...d-taxes-income

    And here is the rub:

    The analysis finds the lowest three income quintiles are in fiscal deficit (benefits received exceed taxes paid) while the two highest income quintiles are in fiscal surplus (taxes paid exceed benefits received). The average household in the bottom quintile received $29,015 in benefits and paid $4,251 in taxes, generating an average fiscal deficit of $24,764 per household. In the top quintile, the average household paid $69,704 in taxes and received $21,515 in benefits and services, yielding an average fiscal surplus of $48,189 per household. The bottom quintile of households received $6.82 in benefits and services for each $1.00 in taxes paid. By contrast the top quintile received 31 cents in benefits and services for every $1.00 in taxes paid. Overall, there was a transfer of roughly one trillion dollars in economic resources from the most affluent 40 percent of households to the bottom 60 percent.
    Read that a few times before replying. Think about that a bit.

    The Mid Upper quintile pays about 7% of the total tax burden after redistribution, and the upper quintile pays about 110% of the taxes.

    Here is supporting information from the Tax Foundation:

    https://taxfoundation.org/distributi...-united-states

    Key Findings

    The question of who benefits from government spending is just as important as the question of who pays taxes. In other words, how do tax and spending policies redistribute income?
    American’s lowest-income families receive $5.28 worth of government spending (federal, state, and local) for every $1 they pay in total taxes.

    Middle-income families receive $1.48 in total spending per tax dollar, while America’s highest-income families receive $0.25 cents in spending for every dollar of taxes paid.
    As a group, the bottom 60 percent of American families receive more back in total government spending than they pay in total taxes.

    Government tax and spending policies combine to redistribute more than $2 trillion from the top 40 percent of families to the bottom 60 percent.

    The total amount of redistribution has increased slightly over the past 12 years. Middle-income and working lower-income families were the biggest beneficiaries.

    Lawmakers can remove equity as an issue in tax reform by matching any loss in progressivity on the tax side with an equal increase in progressivity on the spending side.
    Your position that the subsidies might result in a surplus or related bypass the fact that most of what the government does is internal re-distribution from rich to poor. 3/5th of the budget is direct entitlement of wealth transfer (Medicare/Medicaid, Welfare, SS), and then in the remaining 1/5th that is non defense discretionary spending is all we really spend on education and related. Some of that is also wealth redistribution, but it is to small to direct vs the entitlement spending which has grown with small check.

    This is, out of a $3.5 trillion tax income, up to $2B just in taxes from the upper quintile going to the lower quintiles.

    You are commenting about tax breaks on housing, 401ks and related middle and upper tax breaks, or frothing commentary on how the tax breaks only help the rich...

    They are the only ones paying net taxes.

    Most of them are small business owners, who also pay the majority of the business taxes, and also employ the majority of new hires in the US.

    So, lets look at this in context:

    The government handouts which are equivalent to cutting someone a cheque because they have a mortgage, or because their employer provides their health care, or because they're saving for retirement and their kids' college.
    One small nit: everyone gets a cut on HC taxes, that goes for self employed or otherwise. You can itemize them if you have heavy usage in a year. Why is that a bad thing Steve? Do we need to add even more to the cost of HC? It now totals about $3.4-$3.6T a year, it is the same size of the US government. Put hey, you want it to be more expensive? Heartless bastard. :P And yes, if you are poor, you can use exactly the same tax breaks. Plus get medicaid/ACA or other subsidies. You can even carry over debt for years, and that allows you to basically pay no taxes at all even if you do later come into some wealth. I know, you most likely didn't realize that. But that is part of the bit about debt that is well dealt with by the US government's tax policies.

    On the retirement tax deferment, this position makes me laugh, because you obviously don't know how retirement programs work. In one case, you pay taxes NOW, and there is no tax LATER, when you collect. The other route is to not pay taxes NOW, but LATER, allowing you to put in more money now and allowing it to return at a rate that results in a larger pool that you pay taxes on LATER. Got that? Nobody doesn't pay taxes on this. You are flat wrong in your assumption, or better yet, your transfer of ideas from somebody so doesn't know basic Investing 101, chapter 1. Maybe shouldn't listen to them when it comes to money. Evar.

    The proposed change to the max 401k deduction to $2400 was to push people into Roth IRA's that would have been tax up front, no tax later investments, so the US Government would have money from taxes NOW, instead of LATER. That was the only reason. The government can't wait to spend that money. Huh. (the $2400 limit has since been nixed.) They would get more later, because the money would produce more taxes in the end when cashed out, and the investment is matured. Your conclusion that they US Gov would not get that money is false, they just don't get it right NOW. In fact, stupidly so, since they would earn more due to the investment growing faster than the economy, up to 2 or 3 times more. That really is a short term position that hurts us in the long run. To quote the DNC, why don't you think about the children? That is short term gains for long term loss. The reality is that is waiting 20-30 years for an inflation adjustment payment 2-3 times as much. Huh. It is as if they would rather have the money to spend while they are still a congresscritter instead of collecting it later when it would be a higher amount, reducing the burden on the next generation. Huh. Again, who is being heartless and spending it now selfishly?

    As for a check for their mortgage: I can side with you, that is kinda of like pandering. It only is the largest purchase a person can make, but hey, lets make it a bit harder to buy a house, and leave more people renting. I get it. Same with allowing those in high income tax states the ability to not pay federal taxes on the amount the state takes out? Right? Oh wait.

    Since I agree this is pandering to the middle class, lets look at that. How much is it? Lets use real numbers, not your pulled out of somebodies butt meme based ones:

    http://www.crfb.org/blogs/tax-break-...ing-tax-credit

    The low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) is the fourth most expensive corporate tax break, and was enacted as part of the 1986 tax code overhaul. The LIHTC is the federal government's largest tax expenditure targeting affordable rental housing and (when enacted) represented a new approach to tax expenditures, rather than relying on direct subsidization.
    Wow! 4th largest! That must be huge. BIGELY YUGE.

    According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the LIHTC will cost $6.7 billion in foregone revenue in 2014, or approximately $85 billion over the next ten years. Likewise, OMB estimates that the LIHTC will reduce revenues to the federal government by an average of about $8 billion each year over the next few years.
    $8 Billion a year? Is that IT? OMFG people. Do you think that will fix the budget? We borrow $8 Billion in 2 or 3 days! We spend over $10B a DAY.

    Wow is right. That is about the stupidest thing I have heard. That won't fix the budget. It is....not even within the margin of error. Less than a 1/3rd of 1% of the revenue, and even less than that for the total budget. And you are outraged at THAT?

    Every point you have made is dwarfed by the absolutely massive transfer of wealth from our productive upper quintile to our lowest 3. The US government is now transferring more money than the economy of the entire nation of India's GDP from the upper quintile to the lowest.

    ______________________________________

    In the end, you are not playing with a full set of the numbers. I can see where bits taken here and there can look like the hair pulling out commentary you regurgitated. Same with believing Memes. But as you start putting together the picture as a whole the real, large, complex interchange starts coming forward. And you don't have the maths. Absolutely failed at the maths.

    Since most people would have glazed over my haphazard and messy reply, a quick recap:

    I showed that the vast majority of the tax is paid for buy the upper quintile, and that the lower quintile gets a huge return on their tax input already. So much so that 3/5th of the US tax payers get money back instead of taxing in. To the order of Trillions.

    I showed that taxing investments now results in less money later, even adjusting for inflation, and that your understanding of people being taxed or not is incorrect.

    I showed that collecting the taxes that you think are large subsidies actually result in very minimal, totally insignificant change to the total tax burden.

    ______________________________________


    Until your party can start doing maths, and I know YOU can do it but not when it comes to this it seems, they will still keep butting heads with those of us who actually DO look at the numbers.

    Steve, you are way too friggen smart to be this dumb on the budget. I have met you, you are smarter than this.

    Your entire commentary is invalidated by really bad math.

    _______________________________________

    That you use that to base the moral or emotional content of the other party actually makes my point. Harshly.

    You don't have a clue about the US budget or spending or taxation. That is proven above. Neither do you have a clue about the conservative or libertarian factions of the US political make up. You make baseless conclusions about both based on poor information.

    I would be highly embarrassed if I made those types of budget claims and was proven so wrong, same as you should be embarrassed by making the same conclusions about the other party.

    How wrong can you guys be on the GOP? Well, lets see what the former CEO of NPR says:

    http://nypost.com/2017/10/21/the-oth...-doesnt-cover/

    Most reporters and editors are liberal — a now-dated Pew Research Center poll found that liberals outnumber conservatives in the media by some 5 to 1, and that comports with my own anecdotal experience at National Public Radio. When you are liberal, and everyone else around you is as well, it is easy to fall into groupthink on what stories are important, what sources are legitimate and what the narrative of the day will be.

    This may seem like an unusual admission from someone who once ran NPR, but it is borne of recent experience. Spurred by a fear that red and blue America were drifting irrevocably apart, I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike.
    He goes on:

    It’s not that media is suppressing stories intentionally. It’s that these stories don’t reflect their interests and beliefs.

    It’s why my new friends in Youngstown, Ohio, and Pikeville, Ky., see media as hopelessly disconnected from their lives, and it is how the media has opened the door to charges of bias.

    The mainstream media is constantly under attack by the president. They are “frankly disgusting,” “tremendously dishonest,” “failing,” “they make up the stories” and are now threatened with loss of broadcast licenses if they continue to author “fake news.” And that is just a random Wednesday’s worth of words from Donald Trump.

    Some may take pleasure in the discomfort of the media, but it is not a good situation for the country to have the media in disrepute and under constant attack. Virtually every significant leader of this nation, from Jefferson on down, has recognized the critical role of an independent press to the orderly functioning of democracy. We should all be worried that more than 65 percent of voters think there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media and that our major media institutions are seen as creating, not combating, our growing partisan divide.

    Some of this loss of reputation stems from effective demagoguery from the right and the left, as well as from our demagogue-in-chief, but the attacks wouldn’t be so successful if our media institutions hadn’t failed us as well.
    Is it s good read. He found, to back up all of my commentary, that they were not a bunch of idiots or crazy people. He ended up writing a book about it:

    https://www.amazon.com/Republican-Li...&tag=nypost-20

    And, while you are at it, try Sarah Silverman's new show: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/...ulu/740025001/

    Hate to break it to ya, but they found we are not crazy either.

    Maybe you might find out, like Ken Stern or Sarah Silverman have, that the deplorables are actually really great people.

    It might require math though.
    Last edited by pbjosh; 10-23-2017 at 04:22 PM.
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    To note: I am in favor of a Flat Tax.

    Set a number in the ground, say, $35k. Anything you make over that, 15% tax.

    Business, get a 15 or 20 or 25% tax. No more. No tax breaks, no subsidies, nothing.

    LIMIT the US budget to what is collected by tax revenue.

    That forces the congress critter to make rules and regulations that promote growth of the GDP, limits their ability to do anything for lobbists and in general make them fairly immune to pandering to a preferred company or idea or mood that would allow them to screw with our taxes.

    Keep it flat, fair, simple. Strongly reduce corporatism and crony capitalism by taking away the tool that lawmakers have to be swayed by it: Tax adjustments.

    And balance the budget. Only spend what they earn.
    Last edited by pbjosh; 10-23-2017 at 04:17 PM.
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  6. #2646
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    Quote Originally Posted by pbjosh View Post
    Your position that the subsidies might result in a surplus or related bypass the fact that most of what the government does is internal re-distribution from rich to poor. 3/5th of the budget is direct entitlement of wealth transfer (Medicare/Medicaid, Welfare, SS), and then in the remaining 1/5th that is non defense discretionary spending is all we really spend on education and related. Some of that is also wealth redistribution, but it is to small to direct vs the entitlement spending which has grown with small check.

    This is, out of a $3.5 trillion tax income, up to $2B just in taxes from the upper quintile going to the lower quintiles.
    You've missed the point. Given our current tax brackets, the upper classes are given a $1.5 trillion tax break to deviate from those brackets. Revenues would be around $5 trillion and markets would be less distorted without all the special exemptions carved into the tax code.

    Quote Originally Posted by pbjosh View Post
    On the retirement tax deferment, this position makes me laugh, because you obviously don't know how retirement programs work. In one case, you pay taxes NOW, and there is no tax LATER, when you collect. The other route is to not pay taxes NOW, but LATER, allowing you to put in more money now and allowing it to return at a rate that results in a larger pool that you pay taxes on LATER. Got that? Nobody doesn't pay taxes on this. You are flat wrong in your assumption, or better yet, your transfer of ideas from somebody so doesn't know basic Investing 101, chapter 1. Maybe shouldn't listen to them when it comes to money. Evar.
    As an example, 70% of the retirement tax exemption go to the top 20% of income earners.

    You'll have to let the folks at Forbes know you're better read on the topic. https://www.forbes.com/sites/baldwin.../#20e45662bb6f

    Quote Originally Posted by Mercatus
    These exemptions result in a loss of revenue for the federal government. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that in FY 2013, about $117.2 billion in income tax revenue was not collected from the “net exclusion of pension contributions and earnings,” and the Congressional Budget Office has a slightly higher estimate of $137 billion once the forgone payroll tax revenue is included.1While much of that tax revenue is simply deferred, rather than avoided, the lost payroll tax revenue (i.e., Social Security and Medicare taxes) which employers would have paid on wages is completely forgone. These estimates place the exclusion of retirement savings as the second largest tax expenditure, behind only the tax exclusion of employer-provided health insurance.
    https://www.mercatus.org/publication...-pension-plans

    Quote Originally Posted by pbjosh View Post
    Every point you have made is dwarfed by the absolutely massive transfer of wealth from our productive upper quintile to our lowest 3. The US government is now transferring more money than the economy of the entire nation of India's GDP from the upper quintile to the lowest.
    This is actually just incredibly disgusting. You're blatantly implying that only the upper quintile is productive and that the lower three have no contribution to that wealth. Whether you understand it for yourself or not, you actually want to see a return to feudalism.

    The GDP per capita of India is ~$1800. The GDP per capita of the US is $52,000. Either that transfer of wealth is worth something to help those slovenly lower quintiles be productive, or you think wealthy Indians just aren't as productive as wealthy Americans. How 'bout that exceptionalism.

    Quote Originally Posted by pbjosh View Post
    One small nit: everyone gets a cut on HC taxes, that goes for self employed or otherwise. You can itemize them if you have heavy usage in a year. Why is that a bad thing Steve? Do we need to add even more to the cost of HC?
    Like most of your points you're wrong but I'll let the folks at the AEI, that bastion of liberal thought, answer this one. Just another example of "subsidies for me, not for thee"

    https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebat...ed-health-care

    Quote Originally Posted by pbjosh View Post
    To note: I am in favor of a Flat Tax.
    That would be consistent with everything else you've said.


    At least we can drop the charade of "I care about the people at the bottom", since you clearly see them as unproductive leeches.
    Last edited by PBSteve; 10-23-2017 at 05:00 PM.
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  7. #2647
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    A few points:

    1. Steve is not talking about the low income housing credit, he is talking about Mortgage income deduction. ~$364 Billion/year. This

    http://nationalaglawcenter.org/wp-co...crs/R41596.pdf

    Similarly, the employer healthcare tax credit has the net effect of injecting money into the healthcare system by subsidizing it. If you're a fan of Ron/Rand Paul, you'll remember their (accurate) trope that when you subsidize something, you get more of it. In this case we are subsidizing expensive health care. Much in the same way that our college loan system has allowed educational costs to balloon to the point where they nearly ate my generation, and in the same way that low cost loans (both from predatory lenders and through legislation that allowed low income home loan recipients to overextend their budgets) destablized the housing market. I think there's plenty of room for bipartisan consensus here.

    2. .
    The average household in the bottom quintile received $29,015 in benefits and paid $4,251 in taxes, generating an average fiscal deficit of $24,764 per household. In the top quintile, the average household paid $69,704 in taxes and received $21,515 in benefits and services, yielding an average fiscal surplus of $48,189 per household.
    Ignoring some specifics, let's just say that everyone gets a bunch of stuff for being an American, and it's around $21.5k. Because they need assistance, the lower income brackets get an extra ~$8k. I think these numbers are a little more visceral, but they're from the same report. Focusing on the idea that there's simply a population on either side of the zero is overly simplistic, in my opinion. (The highest quintile begins at household income ~ $265,000.)

    3. Is this such a bad thing? And by "this" I mean redistribution of wealth. I think this is exactly where the principled argumentation can become toxic.

    On a very first pass analysis, yes, "Taxation is theft". This is an ideological wellspring from which much of fiscal conservatism springs, and while it's useful to remember, it's not near capturing the entire story. I think there's certainly an argument to be made for hugely simplified tax curves, but that's never what's actually proposed. I find the focus on estate tax particularly rankling - though it's easily dodged by practical measures

    To understand why redistribution of wealth is necessary and important, one needs to to understand a fair bit of national macroeconomics. Monetary velocity is an important driver of a market economy, because the number of transactions is analogous to the speed of information processing in the market. It's been robustly demonstrated that injection of money into a system, and preferentially to lower income consumers, increases national economic output. This is the "pump priming" mechanism. Lots was written about this in response to the 2008 financial crisis. I'm personally of the belief that the QE could have been handled even more efficiently by shunting more money to consumers and less to banks, but even so the post-facto reports generally lionize QE.

    I think it's important to agree that standing across the idealistic chasm is the need to support some basic human rights of the poor ("no bodies in the streets") with a social safety net. I also think it's good to recognize that a healthy economy, viewed from the national level, needs robust demand. Getting money into the hands of those not in a position to save it, even via redistributive mechanisms, can be generally positive.

    I am sure every reasonably informed individual has seent hat the lion's share of profits have moved to the top 10%, 1%, and 0.1%. CEO to worker pay ratios are at all time highs. In short, the outcomes of market systems are becoming more and more "winner take all". This is, in my opinion, somewhat a natural outcome for capitalism in a global technological society. Technology, at minimum allows for increased productivity per capita. At a fixed level of demand (as in a stagnant population, especially when the savings of the lower half of the society are net nil), this means that a given unit of production by labor drops. Globalism tends to have an averaging effect whereby fungible skills are shunted to lower cost workers, with the ultimate outcome for many functions of labor being zero-labor value.

    It's important to remember that in a perfectly functioning capitalistic society, competition is perfect, and therefore profits will drop to zero as the cost of a given good approaches the most efficient cost of production. Profits, like wages, are often seen as the psychological motivation for business, especially when contrasting with Communism. However, profits, while locally an indication of a successful business, are also indicative of a less-healthy broader marketplace. Profits are a measure of market inefficiency that is directly extracted from consumers.

    I bring this up because at the societal level, American corporate profits are at all time highs, as is compensation to the top 1%. The top quintile has garnered very nearly all of the growth since 1980. It's possible that they "deserved" it, in the narrow sense of value creation - disproportionately this quintile is populated with equity holders, and those with higher degrees - it's very likely that income is, on average, a proxy for economic value.

    However, compensation cannot be the only consideration when considering the economic ramifications of a taxation structure. One construction I like is that the people of a nation are, fundamentally, it's most important resource. If we are not allowing sufficient opportunity for quality nutrition, education, and entrepreneurship (and the US scores quite poorly in many of these metrics compared with more socialized countries: Sweden, Germany, Canada).

    I read your post as pretty moralizing, to be honest - as if there are a huge number of households who don't "deserve" the low level of taxation they receive now. It seems to me that it's quite impossible to seek the state in which "everyone pays for themselves" - and that drawing a line along that continuum is very difficult, if not impossible. I'll spare you the reductio ad absurdum, but I'd think about what your ideal taxation system might be.

    Personally, I'd be trying to get the tax code out of as many markets as possible (specifically housing, education and healthcare - handle these separately), and make the curve of taxation more reflective of the income distribution - our tax brackets end at $450k, maximum for married filing jointly. I wouldn't mind the marginal rates at over $1 million personal income creeping to 50%. I reject the argument that this would harm small business owners - if anything it encourages re-investment, since there's less of an incentive to squeeze profits out.
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    Ack - I hate following myself up.

    Because I have to accept some wrong.

    Here it is.



    Damn. Okay, some revised numbers.

    http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank...-s-tax-breaks/

    Here is some supporting documentation:

    "Low-income people, who pay relatively little income tax, can’t take full advantage of many breaks. One exception is the earned-income tax credit, or EITC, which is aimed at assisting low- to moderate-income workers and their families. Unlike most tax credits, the EITC is refundable, meaning that if a taxpayer owes less tax than the credit is worth, he or she receives the excess amount as a refund. The report estimates that more than 80 percent of the value of the EITC goes to taxpayers with $40,000 or less in income."

    And some 'Josh got it wrong' stuff:

    $143B in HC savings. On top of the $3.4B we already spend. Mind you, that goes toward every one, not just middle or upper class. And self employed get a tax cut also. Look at your 1040 form. Oh yeah: PEOPLE WILL DIE! Had to say it.

    $134B in the difference in capital gains tax. Which is a one I would like to see even in the Flat Tax. It would be counted just the same.

    $109B for deferral of active income of controlled foreign corporations? Not to sure on this one.

    $83B for the deferred tax. As I showed, this is just spending now what would be more money later. And doesn't count the taxes we are collecting from previous deferred retirements we are collecting now.

    $77B for mortgage deduction: Why is that so much different than the other link? I need to look into that. A whole week of tax revenue, not 1 day. My bad.

    $70B for EIC. Maybe we should do away with that also? Along with the rest here?

    $65B for deductability of state and local income and sales tax. This is the one mentioned above - basically a tax credit if your state has high taxes. This is going away. For some odd reason, blue states are not so happy about that.

    $56B to deferred pensions plans. Ask your union before you eliminate that one, mkay? They LIKE that one.

    $56B for the CHILDREN. Think of the children man.

    $53B for subsidies purchased through the ACA. Huh. Only 5 days of US spending worth. That isn't much I would be the first to say. But, if all you are doing is trying to save the items you wanted to cut above, then why not this one?


    Okay, I openly invalidated (or at least shifted my points a good amount) with good counter information (Hint to Gordon, this is how you reply, with good numbers and such, actually on topic) on my own.

    So, I accept my mistakes in the previous commentary, and apologize for them.



    _____________________________________

    In that, lets do a keep and kill list.

    HC savings? I say keep.
    Difference for capital gains? I think most taxes should be flat, so I would adjust it to match a flat tax. Currently it is set at 12.5% or so? Raise it a bit is fine by me.
    Foreign $109B? Anybody? Good or bad? I am ignorant.
    Deferred tax: I showed that is short term gain for long term cost. How about this: Small tax now, small tax later. Split the difference?
    Mortgage Deduction? (shrugs) I don't care either way. I prefer low taxes all around, but make it all flat means this could go.
    EIC? All flat means flat - but the negative tax is one of Milton's smarter positions. Hmm...
    $65B state tax can go.
    Deferred pension? Split, half now, half later.
    Child tax credit. Hmm.... Flat tax says axe it.
    $53B for the ACA. Egads, at this point I don't care. $50B is rather small all in all. 5 days of the US government. I think switching to a Singapore type plan, and then spending this $50B and some of the nearly $1T the US spends in medicare/medicaid and Veterans to supplement those who, in the Swiss style, don't make enough in the 10% taken out to pay for HC would totally save enough to cover this multiple times over, if they don't want to leave the ACA.

    Meh.
    Josh Coray
    J4 Paintball
    Lead Design
    www.j4paintball.com

  9. #2649
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    Of course there were multiple posts between start and finish of that tome
    "So you've done this before?"
    "Oh, hell no. But I think it's gonna work."

  10. #2650
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    Well. That was surprising. Credit where credit is due.
    Ever so many citizens of this republic think they ought to believe that the Universe is a monarchy, and therefore they are always at odds with the republic. -Alan Watts

    I work for the company building the Paragon

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