Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/29/a-fucking-mess.html
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“Meanwhile, states with higher taxes and better services have more productive workforces who are able to buy more things from each other because they spend less money trying to inefficiently pay for vital services out of their individual pockets, instead enjoying the efficiencies of collective pursuit of public health, sanitation, fire prevention, education, etc. They are also more likely to enjoy workplace protections, paid leave, and higher wages.”
Yay, blue states!
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Nobody knew healthcare taxes could be so complicated.
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Doing this will also take a huge bite out of the scammy tax-prep industry, which lobbies to prevent the government from offering you pre-filled tax returns showing what it thinks you owe and letting you amend it, insisting instead that we should all pay them to do our taxes for us, despite the fact that pre-filled tax forms work well and only involve the government disclosing to you what it already knows about your finances.
On a postcard, no doubt.
Standing next to a big pile of tax code printouts.
With a big red tape for a prop.
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I agree that was all a stupid power play.
But even a broken clock, etc.etc. etc.
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All that blue states will need to do to protect their tax-payers is convert the state tax from one that is paid by individuals, and turn it into a payroll tax instead. By having employers collect the tax, rather than having employees pay it at the end of the year, the blue states will convert it from an individual tax and into a corporate tax, and the GOP just effectively abolished corporate taxes.
Interesting to think about what the sane states will do with the money they no longer have to transfer to the conservative-voting basket-case states. California might be able to finally get its balance sheet in order and then start offering free or subsidised health insurance and college tuition befitting the sixth largest economy in the world.
As for Il Douche’s voters in red states, they’ll just fume and double-down on the spite like the natural-born suckers they are. Thanks, morons!
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La Messiah Mas Fina
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This analysis is really skewed. For a start, the new tax law raises the standard deduction to $24,000 for a couple. Then the deductibility of local taxes for those who itemize was capped at $10,000.
Rather than sticking it to Blue States (who have always received an inherent federal subsidy for their taxes), the very wealthy in these states who are paying more than $10,000/year in state taxes, will be taxed at a higher rate.
This is a tax on the wealthy, but your analysis pretends it is a mean GOP tax on the little guy. You should like this - it is exactly the progressive type of tax reform that you always are saying should happen. The 1% in their $10 million homes will not get to deduct all their state taxes from their Federal taxes anymore, and their marginal rates will go up.
Get it right: this is a tax on wealthy who live in blue states.
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As a layman observer I’ve gradually come to the tentative conclusion that some recent real-estate bubbles in high value property markets may not burst any time in the immediate future. My suspicion is that, in an increasing number of cases, the value of these pieces of land and buildings have become decoupled from their intrinsic function.
Now they’re more like works of fine art, possibly of innate quality, but purchased by a buyer more concerned with how their provenance and rarity will impact net worth.
Certainly willing to be proven wrong on this though.
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Do you consider a couple making $70k/yr and living in a $300k home to be very wealthy? Because on Long Island, that’s about the bottom of the housing market in the town (a town of 200k people) where I grew up, and such a couple would be at or above the $10k cap in state and local taxes.
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(a) I think there are some here on bb who would consider that such a couple is definitely paying their “fair share” or perhaps a bit less than their fair share.
(b) Taxes which are initially designed to soak the rich inevitably creep downwards to at least seriously dampen the middle class.
A heckuva lot of those blue state residents who enjoy the efficiencies of collective pursuit of public health, sanitation, fire prevention, education, etc., are rushing to prepay their 2018 state taxes so that they can keep more of their money from the IRS. Is this unpatriotic??
Those folks can take their standard deduction which went up $12,000 and come out ahead. They probably weren’t itemizing to begin with. They just got a meaningful tax cut.
I, living in NYC and itemizing, will see my taxes go up. Yes, millionaires in TX and FL will be unaffected by this, but it isn’t a tax cut for them either, is it? Most analyses of the tax plan show a general benefit for anyone making less than $100K per year.
As someone that lives in one of these red states, you’re throwing a lot of people under the bus for your moment of joy, which is terrible, and very Republican of you.
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“Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.”
- B. H. Obama
Note that I was having some fun at the expense of his voters in the red states. I doubt that you thought that this would turn out any differently than it did.
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And not everyone in those states voted for the Mad Mango. Case in point. Me. Having States v States in a giant pissing contest kinda was already tried, and frankly didn’t work out terribly well last time.
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