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Face, meet leopard. Leopard, meet face.

Segnosaur said:
Its amazing just how much farmers (probably one of the most reliable pro-republican demographics) have been screwed over by trump:
- Trade wars that see other countries applying their own tariffs on American farm products (for example, the chinese tariffs as mentioned.)
- Cuts to USAID stopping contracts for US produced food sent to foreign countries
- Cuts to other programs (such as for alternative energy) affecting secondary income sources
- Trump's plans to apply tariffs on Potash imported from Canada driving up costs of fertilizer
- Efforts to eliminate undocumented immigrants reduce a source of cheap labor
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And the same thing happened last time too.
 
LiteBright said:
Isn't that the truth. One of the clearest examples to me if how they have convinced the middle and lower economic class to hate the concept of an inheritance tax. Even though the vast majority have no chance of ever being affected by it, and their lives could be improved by it, they will argue against it until their last breath.

One of the most potent things about the concept of the 'American Dream' is that is allows every poor person to feel like a rich person in waiting.
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Mmm... I'm not entirely sure about it having no effect. Depending on what the threshold value is set at, most people won't end up with a tax bill, but that doesn't mean there's no effect.

The few inheritance taxes in place in the US have either $25K or $50K attachment points, so if the value of the assets received is greater than that, then the inheritor has to pay taxes. It might not seem like a lot, but for example, when my grandpa died, even though they were very far from wealthy they had paid off their house, the property had increased in value, and they had around $40,000 remaining in 401-K, annuity, and bank accounts total. And that's not including the value of the other items in the house - tools, furniture, jewelry, etc. The overall value was probably in the ballpark of $500,000, split among three children. Split evenly, they each got around $170,000 in *value*. At a 10% tax rate, they would have each had to pay $17,000 in taxes on those assets, even though the actual money received was only around $13,000. They would have been out $4,000 each due taxes. And they would have been taxed a second time when they sold the house.

It would be even worse when my father died. They had inherited my grandmother's house (which was already paid off), and all of its contents. My dad had no real income at the time, working odd jobs for cash to make ends meet, and living in my grandma's house at the time. The house was valued via tax assessor at about $75,000. My dad would have faced a $7,500 tax bill that they couldn't have afforded - forcing them to sell the house in order to pay the tax.

I don't have an objection to taxing inherited income, but I do object to taxing inherited wealth. I have the same issue when people talk about wanting to tax net worth at high levels in order to get higher tax contributions from the very wealthy. There are a lot of situations where taxing net worth can place someone in a position where they're forced to liquidate real assets in order to pay that tax.
 
Segnosaur said:
Another example is how the republicans are fighting against extra people working at the IRS.

There are billions of dollars of unpaid taxes in the US. The problem is, the IRS tends to target lower/middle class workers because their taxes are much simpler to audit. Meanwhile, the wealthy tend to get overlooked because the IRS has a limited number of staff and doesn't have the resources to audit their (usually) more complex tax returns.

The Democrats wanted to hire extra staff to ensure wealthy people would get the proper scrutiny. (And the extra revenue they bring in from unpaid taxes would more than offset the cost of the extra staff, and help reduce the deficit.) But republicans have been fighting against it.

Yeah, I understand nobody likes to pay taxes, but I am pretty sure the poor/middle class would be quite happy to see "the rich" pay, well, what they actually owe.
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Realistically, the IRS is using poor strategy. Wealthy people have more complex taxes, true. But there are also far, far, far fewer of them. IRS could feasibly take 1/10th of the audit staff and dedicate them solely to auditing complex filings. It wouldn't even be specifically targeting wealthy people, it's entirely defensible as being non-discriminatory. But it would disproportionately audit wealthy people. It would also reduce audits on lower and middle income households... who probably don't need an audit in the first place. Chances are that there are no mistakes when the filings are that simple, and even if there were, the amount at risk is extremely low.

Seriously, shift the focus of auditors to prioritize complex filings over simple filings, and they shouldn't need more employees.
 
Emily's Cat said:
Mmm... I'm not entirely sure about it having no effect. Depending on what the threshold value is set at, most people won't end up with a tax bill, but that doesn't mean there's no effect.

The few inheritance taxes in place in the US have either $25K or $50K attachment points, so if the value of the assets received is greater than that, then the inheritor has to pay taxes. It might not seem like a lot, but for example, when my grandpa died, even though they were very far from wealthy they had paid off their house, the property had increased in value, and they had around $40,000 remaining in 401-K, annuity, and bank accounts total. And that's not including the value of the other items in the house - tools, furniture, jewelry, etc. The overall value was probably in the ballpark of $500,000, split among three children. Split evenly, they each got around $170,000 in *value*. At a 10% tax rate, they would have each had to pay $17,000 in taxes on those assets, even though the actual money received was only around $13,000. They would have been out $4,000 each due taxes. And they would have been taxed a second time when they sold the house.

It would be even worse when my father died. They had inherited my grandmother's house (which was already paid off), and all of its contents. My dad had no real income at the time, working odd jobs for cash to make ends meet, and living in my grandma's house at the time. The house was valued via tax assessor at about $75,000. My dad would have faced a $7,500 tax bill that they couldn't have afforded - forcing them to sell the house in order to pay the tax.

I don't have an objection to taxing inherited income, but I do object to taxing inherited wealth. I have the same issue when people talk about wanting to tax net worth at high levels in order to get higher tax contributions from the very wealthy. There are a lot of situations where taxing net worth can place someone in a position where they're forced to liquidate real assets in order to pay that tax.
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While it is easy to imagine injustices that might occur due to inheritance tax, any policy of taxing inherited income but not inherited wealth would simply result in rich people converting their taxable money into non-taxable wealth as quickly as possible. While I am open to exemptions and deferments, the people at the top are grabbing a greater and greater portion of the nation's wealth and that needs to be brought under control somehow.
 
Random said:
While it is easy to imagine injustices that might occur due to inheritance tax, any policy of taxing inherited income but not inherited wealth would simply result in rich people converting their taxable money into non-taxable wealth as quickly as possible. While I am open to exemptions and deferments, the people at the top are grabbing a greater and greater portion of the nation's wealth and that needs to be brought under control somehow.
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In the UK agricultural land has been exempt for about the last 30 years, as a result billionaires like James Dyson have been snapping it up & our already exorbitant land prices have gone through the roof making it almost impossible for tennant farmers to buy land. The problem is being addressed now ( although landowners will still get a preferential deal to anyone else) but they aren't liking it, JCB owner & tax dodger Lord Bamford is apparently giving his staff days off to attend protests against the change.
 
https://www.yahoo.com/news/wisconsin-man-voted-trump-now-155503248.html

Millions of Americans, including Bartell, had voted for President Donald Trump's promise to crack down on "criminal illegal immigrants." But eight weeks in, the mass deportation effort has rapidly expanded to include immigrants whose application for legal status in the country is under review.

Even those married or engaged to U.S. citizens are being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, USA TODAY has learned.
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Segnosaur said:
I am sure that whatever hardships farmers face, I am sure they think its less important than stopping the 0.2% of the population that identifies as transexual from going to the bathroom.

We used to use the term "Yuppies" (Young upwardly mobile/urban professional) to refer to liberal city dwellers with decent incomes. Maybe we should be calling farmers "Burpies" (Big, unintellectual rural people)
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Yuppies were liberal?
 
Reformed Offlian said:
Yuppies were liberal?
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Originally, yes. I seem to remember "Young Urban Professionals" referring to people like doctors and teachers working in cities, while there were also "yummies", "Young and Upwardly Mobile", working in the lower reaches of things like finance and real estate and hoping to get rich. If I recall correctly the two terms came to prominence around the time of the 1984 US election, when they were thought to be important demographics, but then journalists decided that "yuppie" was a better term for the second group.
 
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Thermal said:
Wouldn't they have been Middle -aged Urban Professionals by then? Muppies?
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Not really. Most hippies were teens and very early twenties, in the late 60s and early 70s. By the time they got to the late 70s/early 80s, they were in their late twenties to early thirties, and had jobs... and were now pretty solidly in the yuppie camp. There's only a span of about 10 to 15 years between the height of hippiedom and the heyday of yuppiedom.

Not all of them, of course - you can still find hardcore commune hippies out in the middle of nowhere, even though they're now closing in on 70.
 
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