Senate Republicans narrowly approved $4 Trillion budget plan
The Senate approved a $4 trillion budget Thursday night signaling a major step forward for President Donald Trump’s ambitious promise of “massive tax cuts and reform,” according to the Associated Press .
The 51-49 vote sets the stage for debate later this year to dramatically overhaul the U.S. tax code for the first time in three decades, cutting rates for individuals and corporations while eliminating trillions of dollars of deductions and special interest tax breaks.
The tax cuts would add up to $1.5 trillion to the deficit over the coming decade, however, as Republicans have shelved fears about the growing budget deficit in favor of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rewrite tax laws.
“These are reforms that change incentives and drive growth, and we’ve never done that before,” said Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa.
The upcoming tax measure, always a top item on the GOP agenda, has taken on even greater urgency with the failure of the party to carry out its longstanding promise to dismantle former President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.
Republicans have said failure on taxes would be politically devastating in next year’s midterm elections, when control of the House and Senate are at stake.
https://www.circa.com/story/2017/10/19/nation/senate-republicans-narrowly-approved-4-trillion-budget-plan
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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We are not home free yet - according to the Washington Post, democrats have decided to limit their amendments to the budget. That would allow them to highlight their hot button issues. More politics from Schumer and his voting bloc democrats.
There are still one or two of the most backward banana republics with a greater income disparity than us. This should put us at number one.
Still can't see the greater good, huh? More money in your pocket makes your life better, and when you spend that money, more people have jobs, more sales tax is generated, more businesses open up and more stay afloat.
If you don't like income disparity between you and others, do something with your life and earn more. Or maybe George Soros will give you some of his, so you won't be so poor compared to him.......
We have already tried Trickle Down Economics, it didn't work, "Repeatedly doing the exact same thing over and, over again expecting a different result is a sign of insanity."
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Trickle down has never worked.
You can check with the people living in Kansas today or listen to hard learned truths Bruce Bartlett discovered after he helped President Reagan push through that tax change.
The Reagan tax myth being pushed once again by the GOP and President Trump
I helped create the GOP tax myth. Trump is wrong: Tax cuts don’t equal growth.
The Reagan tax cut did have a positive effect on the economy, but the prosperity of the ’80s is overrated in the Republican mind. In fact, aggregate real gross domestic product growth was higher in the ’70s — 37.2 percent vs. 35.9 percent.
Moreover, GOP tax mythology usually leaves out other factors that also contributed to growth in the 1980s: First was the sharp reduction in interest rates by the Federal Reserve. The fed funds rate fell by more than half, from about 19 percent in July 1981 to about 9 percent in November 1982. Second, Reagan’s defense buildup and highway construction programs greatly increased the federal government’s purchases of goods and services. This is textbook Keynesian economics.
Third, there was the simple bounce-back from the recession of 1981-82. Recoveries in the postwar era tended to be V-shaped — they were as sharp as the downturns they followed. The deeper the recession, the more robust the recovery.
Finally, I’m not sure how many Republicans even know anymore that Reagan raised taxes several times after 1981. His last budget showed that as of 1988, the aggregate, cumulative revenue loss from the 1981 tax cut was $264 billion and legislated tax increases brought about half of that back.
Today, Republicans extol the virtues of lowering marginal tax rates, citing as their model the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which lowered the top individual income tax rate to just 28 percent from 50 percent, and the corporate tax rate to 34 percent from 46 percent. What follows, they say, would be an economic boon. Indeed, textbook tax theory says that lowering marginal tax rates while holding revenue constant unambiguously raises growth.
But there is no evidence showing a boost in growth from the 1986 act. The economy remained on the same track, with huge stock market crashes — 1987’s “Black Monday,” 1989’s Friday the 13th “mini-crash” and a recession beginning in 1990. Real wages fell.
Strenuous efforts by economists to find any growth effect from the 1986 act have failed to find much. The most thorough analysis, by economists Alan Auerbach and Joel Slemrod, found only a shifting of income due to tax reform, no growth effects: “The aggregate values of labor supply and saving apparently responded very little,” they concluded.
The flip-side of tax cut mythology is the notion that tax increases are an economic disaster — the reason, in theory, every Republican in Congress voted against the tax increase proposed by Bill Clinton in 1993. Yet the 1990s was the most prosperous decade in recent memory. At 37.3 percent, aggregate real GDP growth in the 1990s exceeded that in the 1980s.
Despite huge tax cuts almost annually during the George W. Bush administration that cost the Treasury trillions in revenue, according to the Congressional Budget Office, growth collapsed in the first decade of the 2000s. Real GDP rose just 19.5 percent, well below its ’90s rate.
We saw another test of the Republican tax myth in 2013, after President Barack Obama allowed some of the Bush tax cuts to expire, raising the top income tax rate to its current 39.6 percent from 35 percent. The economy grew nicely afterward and the stock market has boomed — up around 10,000 points over the past five years.
Learn from history.
Don't keep repeating the same mistake over and over again to the determent of the country.
That is an interesting view of history. Kind of like saying - "don't believe your own eyes believe me".
I'm here to educate:
“According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, 1982-1999 was one continuous mega-economic expansion. In fact, as it stretched into 2007, this 25 Year Boom saw a tripling in the net wealth of U.S. households and businesses from $20 trillion in 1981 to $60 trillion by 2007. When adjusted for inflation, more wealth was created in this 25-year boom than in the previous 200 years. This sustained economic growth is not only impressive on its own, but even more astonishing as it compares to the period immediately preceding it. In the 10 years from 1972-1982, recessions were deep and recoveries were short. In fact, throughout American history, the nation’s economy has been in recession or depression roughly one-third of the time. But from 1981-2005, the annual growth rate of real gross domestic product (GDP) in the U.S. was 3.4 percent per year, and 3.8 percent per year during the 1983-1989 Reagan expansion alone.”
Hello, are you all determined to ignore the CURRENT beneficiary of trickle down? KANSAS? Kindly deal with what has been happening in that state, where all of your tax and cut dreams came true! THAT is what you have to answer to. Reagan was long ago and did end up making our deficits huge, it started there, and the best growth in the country happened when taxes were much, much higher than they are now, during the 50's and 60's.
You may be the first person I've ever known to equate high taxes with growth. I wonder if you are referring to when we taxed to pay off WWII debt. That's what we used to do. We ran deficits during wars, then paid them off - until liberals started running deficits for entitlements which can no longer be paid off.
What does the state of Kansas have to do with the federal budget?
With benefits taken by the rich and benefits given to the poor, our middle class is overdo for some benefits
They always have been overdue. Let's hope this works!
Funny, when those trickle down policies started, so did the slow decline of the middle class. Which did very well when taxes were higher and income gap was much lower. You must answer to the failures.
Its far too late for me to discuss your information, which is good but too detailed for nightbrain, (I didn't know you could do graphs here, I have a lot to learn on NT). But I do know immigration is not the main reason for the decline of the middle class. I hope I can find this tomorrow, I can't always find specific things here yet.
He didn't create a graph, just embedded an image or link to the graphs. To do that, just click on the little movie icon next to the smiley face.
The budget plan has always been meaningless. It is the actually APPROPRIATIONS that need to be watched carefully. That is where the actual money is spent, the budget is just the wish list.
What about deficits?
The deficit is based on how much money over what is brought in has been spent. That includes money spent in each appropriation and on the debt and what taxes and fees have been collected by the Federal Government and again that has nothing to do with the budget but the appropriations process.