The CBO Score

The reason I hate doing pieces like this is I feel compelled to revisit the counter-intuitive ways that money is not what you think it is and deficits and debts don’t really matter but what you buy does.

Money is an artificial construct that facilitates economic transactions. That’s it. It’s only other value is as a collectable, dust gathering, knickknack. If you have the ability to create as much as you want to out of thin air and get anything you desire with this imaginary fiction (sovereign currency) there is no limit to the actual items you can possess (roads, bridges, universal health care). The only practical constraint is dealing with scarcity when someone has something that you need but can’t produce yourself and is unwilling to surrender it for the price you want to pay. This is called inflation or trade, or in extreme cases war, but hey, that’s what you have armies for.

There is absolutely no indication the United States has inflation sufficient to even erode the vast pile of cash Multinational Monopoly Megacorporations and Plutocrat Billionaires have stuffed in their mattresses let alone give them an incentive to invest in productive enterprise (making things, doing things, paying their employees more).

Throwing $2+ Trillion at them (the official lie is $1.5 Trillion) is not going to change their collective minds. It’s pocket change, it falls in the rounds.

It will have no macroeconomic effect at all (do you call a best case .02% increase significant?).

What the Republican tax cut does is make everyone’s lives more miserable, and to a measurable degree. Please ignore the Debt/Deficit madness in this piece and consider instead the nice things we “can’t afford” as a society so a select few you can practically count on the fingers of one hand can buy fake Leonardos.

Senate GOP tax bill hurts the poor more than originally thought, CBO finds
By Heather Long, Washington Post
November 26, 2017

The Senate Republican tax plan gives substantial tax cuts and benefits to Americans earning more than $100,000 a year, while the nation’s poorest would be worse off, according to a report released Sunday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Democrats have repeatedly slammed the bill as a giveaway to the rich at the expense of the poor. In addition to lowering taxes for businesses and many individuals, the Senate bill also makes a major change to health insurance that the CBO projects would have a harsh impact on lower-income families.

By 2019, Americans earning less than $30,000 a year would be worse off under the Senate bill, CBO found. By 2021, Americans earning $40,000 or less would be net losers, and by 2027, most people earning less than $75,000 a year would be worse off. On the flip side, millionaires and those earning $100,000 to $500,000 would be big beneficiaries, according to the CBO’s calculations.

The main reason the poor get hit so hard in the Senate GOP bill is because the poor would receive less government aid for health care.

The Senate Republican tax bill eliminates the requirement that almost all Americans purchase health insurance or else pay a penalty. The CBO has calculated that health insurance premiums would rise if this bill becomes law, leading 4 million Americans to lose health insurance by 2019 and 13 million to lose insurance by 2027.

Many of the people who are likely to drop health insurance have low or moderate incomes. If they drop health insurance, they will no longer receive some tax credits and subsidies from the government. The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the other official nonpartisan group that analyzes tax bills, put out a similar report showing how lower-income families are hurt by the loss of the health-care tax credits. But the CBO goes a step further than the JCT. The CBO also calculates what would happen to Medicaid, Medicare and the Basic Health Program if the Senate GOP plan became law. The CBO is showing even worse impacts on poor families than the JCT did.

You normals are miserable ingrates. You should be kissing your masters’ asses for the privilege of being alive- slackers.