I liked this, in the FT this morning by Rana Foroohar:
Believing that the Republican tax plan will create real growth and jobs in America is a bit like believing in immaculate conception. There is no proof, so, at this point, you just have to take it on faith.
She's clearly a non-believer. And so am I.
There are only three possible outcomes from this tax reform.
The first is companies will have more retained profit.
The second is that they don't invest it, but do share buy-backs instead.
And the third is that the wealthiest in the US will get wealthier at cost to everyone else as a result.
Of course, really that's only one outcome because these three events are linked. But when it comes to faith I believe that's the intended one. Nothing else is plausible.
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Pure dogma – nothing more – nothing less.
And fifteen million people lose healthcare..
“Q: Will the ACA mandate be repealed?
A: We expect the penalty on the uninsured to be set to $0, which would have the same practical effect as repeal. The Senate legislation sets the penalty on the uninsured to $0, which is estimated to generate over $300bn in budgetary savings over the next ten years. This is used to expand other tax cuts in the bill. House Republicans have been more supportive of repealing the individual mandate than Senate Republicans have, so Senate passage suggests that this change is likely to be included in the final version of the legislation, in our view.
Repealing the mandate would have two main effects. First, insurance coverage would decline. CBO has estimated that the level of uninsured would rise by 4 million in the first year after mandate repeal, and by 12 million in the third year.1 Given that the enrollment period for 2018 concludes in less than two weeks on December 15, around the same time that we expect tax reform legislation to become law, our expectation would be that the decline in coverage in 2018 would be somewhat smaller than the CBO estimate but that the effect in later years would be similar”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-03/heres-whats-it-goldman-explains-all-you-need-know-about-current-state-tax-reform
Oh..and:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-03/house-republicans-prepare-war-fbi-doj-over-anti-trump-investigation-bias
Getting worse.
It’s simple to join the dots
1) borrow money at cheap government rates (increasing the national debt by $1.5T)
2) give it free of charge to big corporations and hedge funds in tax cuts
3) they invest it in stocks to drive up the value of their own investments, making themselves massively richer in the process, but doing nothing for the real economy
Besides being immoral it will all come crashing down when markets finally realise that stocks are overvalued. Meanwhile the real economy stalls due to cuts in public spending needed to pay for the deficit. However, the billionaires won’t care so long as they get rich and then exit before the crash comes. Plain criminal.