Posted on

The #GOPTaxScam: A Look Behind the Scenes at the Corruption Involved. How the National Debt Increased by Over $3.5 TRILLION.

Corporations, which drove the train, got even more of a tax cut than they wanted. Yet they refused to promise that their huge tax break would hike worker wages. Medium-sized and big businesses got something they had only dreamed of — though in provisions so badly written one tax expert called them a “travesty.”

Rich Republicans lobbied Trump at a Manhattan fundraiser and got 2.6 percentage points lopped off their highest tax bracket.

Deficit hawks, that is, those opposed to creating any new federal debt, hemmed and hawed and finally folded, as one commentator put it, “like a cheap suit.”

An idea that would have raised $1 trillion and paid for much of the tax cuts was soundly defeated by a powerful business lobby.

Republicans used $1.5 trillion in what some call accounting gimmicks to either hide the true cost of the bill or help justify their votes.

The bill was drafted in secret, partly to keep it from Congress’s own members who, it was feared, would leak it to lobbyists.

[And, of course, the Koch brothers and their fellow plutocrats were involved.]

The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in September 2016 looked at its proposals for individual tax cuts and found that by 2025, 99.6 percent of its net tax cuts would go to the top 1 percent of earners. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center said the plan would cause the federal debt to rise $3 trillion in its first 10 years and $6.6 trillion by the end of the second decade.

The Center for Public Integrity

The Takeaway: NEVER vote for a Republican.

Posted on

Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too.

Republicans have long taken to complaining when their warped ideology and tribe are questioned. One of their recent complaints: “Republicans are discriminated against on social media”. That argument is, of course, bullshit.

At a Twitter all-hands meeting on March 22, an employee asked a blunt question: Twitter has largely eradicated Islamic State propaganda off its platform. Why can’t it do the same for white supremacist content?

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

Motherboard (Vice)

It has also been observed that if Twitter banned white supremacists, many of those banned would be Trump supporters, and that would result in an uproar from the cult of the moron. Apparently, Twitter prefers to avoid an uproar from the moron’s cult.

Posted on

Trump Wants to Cut Survival Lifelines. The White House’s New Budget Exposes Donald Trump’s Lies About Protecting Medicare and Medicaid

So how does the “Budget for a Better America” treat Medicare and the other programs that Trump vowed to safeguard at all costs? By calling for even larger cuts to them than the White House proposed this time last year, when it formally abandoned Trump’s campaign pledges. The budget for the 2019 fiscal year called for five hundred and fifty billion dollars in cuts to Medicare over ten years. With the budget deficit skyrocketing as a consequence of the Trump-G.O.P. tax bill, the 2020 budget would reduce spending on Medicare by eight hundred and forty-five billion dollars over the next decade. Even in Washington, that’s a lot of money.

But he wants $6.8 billion for his wall.

The New Yorker

Posted on

GOP Tax “Reform” Example: Netflix Posted Biggest-Ever Profit in 2018 and Paid $0 in Income Taxes

The popular video streaming service Netflix posted its largest-ever U.S. profit in 2018­­—$845 million—on which it didn’t pay a dime in federal or state income taxes. In fact, the company reported a $22 million federal income tax rebate.

After a year of speculation and spin, the public is getting its first hard look at how corporate tax law changes under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act affected the tax-paying habits of corporations. The law sharply reduced the federal corporate rate, expanded some tax breaks and curtailed others. The new tax law took effect at the beginning of 2018, which means that companies are just now closing the books on their first full year under the new rules.

If Netflix’s earnings report is any indication, not much has changed. Many corporations are still able to exploit loopholes and avoid paying the statutory tax rate—only now, that rate is substantially lower.

ITEP (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy)

Posted on

Older, right-leaning Twitter users spread the most fake news in 2016

In a new study published Thursday in the journal Science, political scientists surveyed the inhabitants of this Internet pocket around the time of the last presidential election, from Aug. 1 to Dec. 6, 2016. They found that people who shared fake news were more likely to be older and more conservative. “Super-sharers” were responsible for the bulk of fake news, soaking their Twitter feeds in falsehoods with the gusto of kids with water pistols. They were enthusiastic communicators, tweeting an average of 70 times a day, and had a very limited reach.

Washington Post