well, that was anticlimatic....

[callmeslick]

....referring to Trump's tax plan. Took me until now to slog through it, and SURPRISE!, everyone gets a tax cut and no one explains how the deficit won't skyrocket in the process, short of hosing every aspect of the government, from defense to social welfare.

[Tunnelcat]

Didn't you get the Trump memo? He's going to grow the economy so big and fast his tax cuts will pay for themselves.

[woodchip]

Kinda like Reagan did.

[callmeslick]

Kinda like Reagan did.

exactly, resulting in the largest deficit growth in the past 40 years until we had the Bush recession.

[woodchip]

And also reduced the Jimmy Carter inflation rate of 13% to 4%. This alone helped create the deficit as the tax base collapse due to how taxes are assessed.

.

[callmeslick]

And also reduced the Jimmy Carter inflation rate of 13% to 4%. This alone helped create the deficit as the tax base collapse due to how taxes are assessed.

.

nice dancing, Fred Astaire.

[Tunnelcat]

Here's what happened with Reagan. The national debt doubled, he increased defense spending by 35% to fight those evil commies, government spending increased by 2.5% per year while he was in office, he expanded Medicare and increased the payroll tax to help out with the funding of Social Security. His Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volcker, raised the Feds fund rate to 20%, which DID help to end the double-digit inflation we were suffering from, but it also put us back into another recession and gave Reagan a 10.8% unemployment rate, the highest of any recession since the Great Depression. Volcker had to lower the rates again to stop that embarrassing little recessionary backslide. After all that mess, THEN Reagan's expansion began. Makes you wonder if any of that future growth was because of any of Reagan's policies, or was it because the economic winds were blowing that way anyway and Reagan took credit? By the way, Obama's current unemployment rate sits around 5%.

But wait, there's more dirt under the rug. Reagan had far more scandals under his watch than that of most of our recent presidents, including Obama and Nixon. Only Dubya comes closer. Reagan also had the 1987 Black Monday under his watch, the Savings and Loan failures of 1987 and signed into law the bipartisan Garn-St.Germain Act in 1982, which set the stage for the future bank crisis in 2008, although it's still unclear if it had anything to do with the Savings and Loan failures in 1987. There's a lot of tarnish on that supposed golden legacy.

Now tell me how Trump is going to pay for all his grand-grow-the-economy ideas with the debt our government is currently carrying, plus build his impenetrable southern border wall AND give many of the wealthy a huge tax break all at the same time WITHOUT creating more deficit spending, like Reagan? Maybe it will be so because Obama can't force corporations to start hiring, despite the fact that all these corporations are still sitting on mountains of cash and have been all through Obama's tenure, they will suddenly and magically decide to hire more people in the U.S. and the U.S. consumer will magically start on a spending spree, because all the plutocrats now have a billionaire business butt kisser as their prez?

[Lothar]

Obama can't force corporations to start hiring, despite the fact that all these corporations are still sitting on mountains of cash and have been all through Obama's tenure, they will suddenly and magically decide to hire more people in the U.S.

One of the reasons corporations are sitting on mountains of cash is that they don't want to hire people and then have the rules change on them and be stuck with a bunch of bad hires at an inflated price. Obamacare, threats of raising the minimum wage, etc. make companies very reluctant to hire low-wage/low-skill staff (janitorial, maintenance, stuff like that.) So they'll sit on their cash reserves until the legal situation changes in their favor.

[Tunnelcat]

Obama can't force corporations to start hiring, despite the fact that all these corporations are still sitting on mountains of cash and have been all through Obama's tenure, they will suddenly and magically decide to hire more people in the U.S.

One of the reasons corporations are sitting on mountains of cash is that they don't want to hire people and then have the rules change on them and be stuck with a bunch of bad hires at an inflated price. Obamacare, threats of raising the minimum wage, etc. make companies very reluctant to hire low-wage/low-skill staff (janitorial, maintenance, stuff like that.) So they'll sit on their cash reserves until the legal situation changes in their favor.

When does anything ever stay static, or end up the way these guys want things to be? If all these corporations continue to be risk adverse, nothing will ever grow or change. Nothing will get done. They're like stodgy old men that can't decide when the time is right to get up out of their own chairs. Memo to these pantywaists: The time may never be right and they may have missed it already. In fact, they ARE the problem. They're in the way.

As for health care, that's going to blow up in everyone's faces no matter what any president does, because when corporations are eventually allowed to quit paying for their employees health insurance and shove the cost on their employees, and you know that's the way it's heading, their employees will go bankrupt themselves just paying for it. Everyone loses but the fat cats.

What we need are more entrepreneurs willing to do this for the betterment and cost transparency of our health care system, not just profit. I heard about her this morning. She's shaking up the expensive lab industry already. She wasn't risk adverse at all.

http://fortune.com/2014/06/12/theranos-blood-holmes/

[callmeslick]

the reason a lot of corporations are sitting on cash is that, thus far, the recovery is limited to the US and even that is tentative. Cash reserves put them in position to capitalize(no pun intended) on opportunities as they arise. The don't need to hire excessively partly due to increased productivity and partly due to stretching hours for employees which were underutilized.

[Tunnelcat]

I think most corporations are liberal adverse.