SE Hoya Containment Thread (now featuring Hoya)

It's hard to say for sure if it's run bad or something else, but the cycle extends well beyond clinton/bush, and extends far enough (and is clear enough) that it's worth not totally dismissing as runbad.

Recent study on the subject

Lol

So again, through what mechanism is Bernie going to significantly tax every class the likes of which we've never seen before?

that's the Princeton study that usually gets cited about this, there's also a Daily Kos (lol) takedown of the myth of Republican economic stewardship that's pretty brutal

I bring it up because it really does appear that the Republican Party is empirically speaking bad at money, which is the only thing they're supposed to be good at in the first place

Why do you think the economy was stagnant during Bush's presidency? Could it have had anything to do with massive defense spending?

Fwiw I think Bill Clinton was a much worse president then given credit for.

I didn't comment on previous eras because I know basically absolutely nothing about political parties and their beliefs before Clinton. Do you have cliffs on that article though?

Do Presidents who follow pro-business Presidents generally fare better? It wouldn't surprise me at all if there was a 5-10 year lag. Do Presidents who take over several years into a bust generally outperform wrt economic metrics? I would suspect that the power of the economic cycle is much more relevant than politics in determining economic fortune.

Does this factor his proposed elimination of premiums, copays, and deductibles?

ok?

I think he inherited the end of a 2 decade long bull market (interrupted by a crash in 1987, but it was still a major cyclical bull) as technology had materially changed the workplace for the better, but also put us in a position where parts of the workforce no longer had great skillsets when compared to available jobs.

Bush was a huge clown for sure, but I don't think he is to blame for a stagnant economy and definitely not for the housing crash.

I don't think so either. Presidents always get too much credit and blame for things. But Bush was pretty directly to blame for sinking trillions of dollars into wars which certainly didn't help the economy.

And Rubio and Cruz claim to be the most conservative of all and I fear they'd both do the same thing.

War mongers WOAT.

yup politics all just variance, lock er up

I get that this post made sense when you wrote it, but arguiing that someone making between the 99th and 99.5th percentile of income is struggling and can't afford additional taxes is.. a stretch.

Also your 50% effective tax rate assumption is based on fiction, there's no one close to that in the US. All in federal tax rates top out at around 30%, and that's for the top 1% of earners.

What Ike's super awesome chart fails to note is that the average family healthcare plan premium in the US is $16,500 total. The median household income in the US is $50,000.

Using the same assumption that the gentleman that made the chart used for payroll taxes (the burden is directly shifted to employees in lower wages), let's roughly calculate the shift in income for the median household.

The costs of a median US household to employers is: $50,000 wages + $7,500 payroll tax + $12,000 average employer health insurance premium contribution + whatever other benefits = $69,500 + whatever other benefits

Median worker take home pay is $50,000 - taxes (~7,650) - average employee premium contribution ($4,500) + whatever other benefits = net income is $37,850 + whatever other benefits

Under Bernie's proposal, with the assumption that the employer is willing to pay an equal for an employee as before:

$57,014 wages + $12,486 in payroll taxes + whatever other benefits = $69,500 + whatever other benefits

Median worker take home pay is now $57,014 - taxes ($9,806) + whatever other benefits = net income $47,208 + whatever other benefits


This doesn't even take into account out of pocket expenses from healthcare. This clearly benefits the average household. I could make an excel sheet to determine the breakeven point later.


in b4 i missed a bunch of different employer expenses but I was mainly getting at the income/payroll taxes in the chart.

If you have budgeted expenses based on a certain level of income and that income falls short you will have to make cuts. It doesn't matter if you make $6.50/hr or are $100mm/year. These cuts in spending can have far reaching effects and could even trigger another financial crisis if the tax increases result in people falling short on mortgages or becoming insolvent due to an inability to cut discretionary spending fast enough.

While 250k might seem like a lot (and it is based on a global or historical context) you still need to make more than that to afford a house, utilities, transportation, childcare, food, clothes, sports/extracurriculars, internet, cellphones, and retirement savings in many major cities. Sure, you don't really need new clothes for your kids every year bc you can buy them at goodwill and sure a cellphone isn't essential to staying alive, but they are pretty reasonable requests as are good childcare programs and having the ability to enroll your kids in extracurriculars.

If you start taxing the hell out of people before they can even afford these things you're going to get people like me who think it is too much.

I get that things like having kids or living in a city are choices and not a right, but they should be choices that people feel like they can make and still afford.


Furthermore, you must be pretty bad at reading because I wasn't talking about federal taxes, I was talking about total taxes. I know for a fact that I paid over 30% in taxes last year so lol at saying that's the top.

Of course it's not runbad. You slash taxes for the rich and services for the poor, pretty soon quality of life is a lot ****tier for people who aren't rich. You increase military spending while doing this, pretty soon you have a massive budget deficit.

I guess it's just a massive coincidence that budget deficits when up when Reagan and W did those things. I guess it's just a massive coincidence that the share of wealth in this nation has increasingly gone to the very few while these policies were enacted.

Christ, I don't even know why I'm posting this. Like anyone who doesn't get this is going to be convinced anyway. Forum full of Dunning-Krueger Effect Randites.

Special lolz to ikes though for his "Bernie will ruin everything" / "Presidents don't have much control of anything" cognitive dissonance.

luda, I don't believe that businesses are going to pass on all the savings from healthcare to their employees and I think it is very very naive to believe that pretax wages rise meaningfully for the vast majority of employees.

That chart assumes every cent of payroll tax is passed on through wage decreases. Why wouldn't it be the same for healthcare?

fwiw, I am very much against current military spending levels and think they should be cut annually until we reach more reasonable levels. Not sure what is reasonable bc I haven't done much research on it, but I can't imagine we need to spend more than 50% the current budget.

I'd be fine if we could cut that budget by 50% in the next decade and spend 25% of the savings on education, 25% on healthcare, and not spend the other 50%.

because government healthcare would represent a savings to a company and not a cost. Companies will pass through costs at a higher rate than savings.

Except it's not a savings or a cost. It's a net 0 change in the cost of the employing that employee. An employee that cost $69,500 to employ before still costs $69,500 to employ.

I'm just telling you how things will work in actuality. Businesses aren't going to tell employees "hey bro, you know that medical insurance we aren't covering anymore? how bout you take another $12,500." They may however tell employees "Payroll taxes are up so it costs us more to employee you so we can't give you a raise this year and you've already got insurance coverage from the government."

This is nonsensical, baseless fear mongering.

This is just wildly and offensively wrong.


And? Why should a majority of people care what you think? They're busy literally trying to survive. Whether or not you can afford HBO and high speed Internet after taxes is of no concern to all the people who will be voting for Bernie.

I don't know how much you made but seems like you're doing something wrong if you're paying that much. Do you know what deductions are?

And then that employee goes to that other company that is willing to pay them an additional $12,500 because it still costs them exactly the same as it did before. The FREE MARKET still applies to the job market.

Like, you mean how a bill gets passed and ****? I don't think you need that explained to you right?