Trump's "tax plan" is inane gibberish that is not going to pass ever.

"Yesterday the Trump administration pretended to release a tax plan, and while this obliges reporters, and poor Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, to pretend that it was a tax plan, we are under no such obligation here. It doesn't even look like a tax plan! You can tell because there are almost no numbers in it, and the fonts are all wrong. Also, it would fit on a napkin, but it takes planning to print things on a napkin, and they clearly wrote this on the bus over to the press conference.

Bloomberg reports:
If the one-page outline seemed hastily assembled, it was. Some Treasury officials found out that a plan would be made public Wednesday only after Trump announced his intentions last Friday, promising “massive” tax cuts. The Treasury staffers and counterparts from the White House then rushed to prepare a presentation with enough viable talking points to satisfy Trump’s expectations, while keeping it open-ended enough to leave room for further consideration.

It was designed to fool Donald Trump into thinking that it's a tax plan, but the rest of us*don't need to be fooled.

Still there will be a lot of talk about winners and losers in the hypothetical universe where this plan becomes law. An obvious set of winners is corporations, whose top tax rate would drop from 35 to 15 percent. But through the magic of accounting, some of these winners would look like losers:

Banks like Citigroup and Bank of America would have to take some sour with the sweet: A lower tax rate would mean they will have to take billions of dollars in charges against earnings to write down the value of their giant piles of “deferred tax assets.”

Next time someone complains that companies that report non-GAAP earnings are using "fantasy numbers," let's all remember that GAAP would require Citigroup and Bank of America to report billions of dollars of losses solely because they will pay lower taxes in the future. Under this tax plan, Citi and BofA would have the same amount of money now, and more money in the future, but under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles they would have to report a huge loss anyway. Presumably shareholders would also be interested in the pro forma non-GAAP numbers excluding that loss.

Another set of hypothetical winners is owners of pass-through entities, like hedge-fund managers and law firm partners and Trump himself, whose taxes on their business income would top out at 15 percent. Here is one who is hypothetically excited:

One adviser to hedge funds, Michael Laveman of accounting firm EisnerAmper LLP, said the proposal would act as a tax cut for hedge-fund owners who share management fee income. Management fees, he said, are typically taxed at the current top 39.6% rate.

Mr. Laveman’s own firm, also a partnership, would be among the beneficiaries. “I’m trying not to tell my wife about the huge tax break we are about to get,” he said.

Cute! Wait, why not? Because he wants to keep her in the dark about the family's finances, or because, like me, he is not counting on this tax break being real? I assume that the way it would work is that any pass-through business income that is kept in the business would be subject to a 15 percent tax, while any income that is paid out in compensation -- and in particular, any income that is used to pay personal expenses -- would be subject to higher personal tax rates. In practice this would turn into sort of a consumption tax, at least on the rich: You'd pay personal income taxes on the money you need to live on, but 15 percent on money you can save. Those who need their money would be taxed more than those who don't. But here I am interpreting a lot, from the one-pager.

Hypothetical losers include people who live in New York, who would pay federal taxes on the money they pay in state taxes. I mean, also people in other high-tax states, but I live in New York, so that is of more hypothetical interest to me. Though I can avoid some of the problem by selling Money Stuff to Bloomberg via Money Stuff Business Thing LLC, my pass-through entity. (I have consulted the academic literature on naming and gravitas in coming up with its name.)

Elsewhere in executive theater, the Trump administration pretended to plan to pull out of Nafta for a few hours yesterday, but then backed away from that. Markets reacted sharply to the pretend withdrawal, and don't they feel silly now?" -- Matt Levine

The Trump administration, where the buck stops...somewhere, anywhere, DEFINITELY not here

It's OBAMA'S fault that Trump hired a future convict as his national security advisor!

The NFL helped kill online poker. Boycott them.

A beautiful moment tonght at the draft. A goldstar mother and son were on hand to announce the pick for The Eagles. The crowd chanted USA! USA! USA! With the Giant American flag waving behind on the jumbotron.

Not a dry eye in the house. God bless America! God bless President Trump!

A gold star mother and father spoke at the DNC and Trump attacked them, lol mongidig

Pre-election words and actions are a better indicator of post-election activity than play in college is an indicator of play in the pros.

The 100-days measure may be arbitrary and based on nothing but America's obsession with round numbers, but it happens to be the standard all Presidents have been judged on. It's also 7% of one term, so while not a large sampling, it's also not a tiny one.

For pdox, remember in early February that day that ICE conducted tons of raids across the US?

Half of the 675 immigrants arrested had either driving/DUI convictions or had never been convicted of anything

I'm talking about a nice moment from tonight. Please don't make this political. These people have suffered enough.

This is the President Trump thread, so, uh, no, it's kinda political by definition.

In other news: Trump wouldn't talk to Taiwan again without checking with China first. LOL this big tough leader who was gonna label China a currency manipulator and all that ****, this is what getting cucked looks like.

No. It's what being flexible looks like goofy.

Solving the NK problem with China's help is probably more important than talking to Taiwan at this point. Surely you would agree.

Ohhh okay, I see. For Obama it was being a weak leader to say one thing and later do another, even if he had good reasons, but when Trump contradicts himself we congratulate him on his pragmatic flexibility!

It's hard to keep up with the incredibly rapid changes in the rationales Trump fans give for supporting him.

The rationales haven't changed.

A phone call with Taiwan is unimportant in the bigger picture of NK. Being flexible about that is not weakness. However, Obama's red line backdown was weak in the context of the Syrian situation at the time.

Maybe you should look at your own rationale for criticizing a smart logical decision by the current president.

Not sure which is worse: someone who thinks it is logically to predict higher/lower tax collected from a tax plan with no details or someone who denies that lower taxes often mean more economic growth. I think backing the prediction is worse. I would love to hear the convos they have that led them to believe there would be less tax collected.

Okay, take it up with the bipartisan group that did the research NYT was reporting on.

lol you thought it was liberals making up numbers didn't you? Poor mickey, such a simple world you live in.

I'm not! I'm glad Trump is showing restraint, I criticized the Taiwan call when he did it. Rather, I'm laughing at his idiot supporters who loved the Taiwan call at the time and thought it was a sign of things to come from Trump's foreign policy, a time when Trump was gonna put the world on NOTICE and do things his way. Yeah, how about that?

Reposting this from alpha:

This just stuck out to me because of the other day when juan was really upset that we weren't talking more about the terrorist attack in Paris. You know, the one that killed one policeman and injured three others. juan wanted that to be front page news all over PU (it was front page news in the entire media, of course), and yet the only reason we know about this home-grown right-wing political terrorism story above is because it happened where Mayo lives.

Marine Le Pen, in response to the shooting, said mosques in France should be closed. What should we do about these right-wing terrorists targeting liberals here at home?

Lol at thinking a think tank is bipartisan because they call themselves bipartisan. That is rich.

If we close Mosques (which I don't think we should) because of Muslims attacks I think we should shut down storefront and other alt-right websites if alt-right people start commuting 20x more terrorist attacks than they currently do or whatever it takes to make them commit as many as Muslims.

party of personal responsibility amirite tho

A couple significant differences.

1) radical islamists wants anyone who is not one of them dead. I'd say this ideoligy that is shared by millions of people is more of a threat than a single crazy guy.

2) Islamic terrorism can have devastating affects on the economy. Not so much when crazy white people attack.

3) Islamic terror attacks increase the cost of security since it is a threat to everyone.

mongo,

its not just one crazy person tho. there have been numerous white supremacist attacks recently.

-dylan roof killed a bunch of ppl at a black church trying to start a race war.
-crazy white supremacist terrorist killed 6 ppl at a mosque in quebec a few months ago.
-guy in st louis screams "go back to your country" before killing an indian national who was legally in the states and contributing to this countries economy by working in a highly technical field.
-just over a month ago a man who admitted that he wanted to kill as many black ppl as possible, stabbed a random black man to death in midtown new york.
-in feb a man admitted to an undercover fbi agent that he was going to conduct a dylan roof style attack while attempting to buy a gun from said agent for said purpose.
-in early march, in washington, a sikh man shot in his own driveway by a man yelling (Im sure you can guess at this point) "go back to your country" link
-a man wrote on facebook he wrote: “I’m going to the Milo event and if the snowflakes get out off hand I’m just going to wade through their ranks and start cracking skulls.” the day before shooting a protestor in the stomach.
-guy shoots and wounds 5 black ppl at a black lives matter protest. he had bragged previously about his intentions and jury found it racially motivated. link

do I really need to go on? that is just from memory.

This proves my point. Most of these attacks weren't big news. Had these been Islamic inspired attacks it would have been big news and could cause significant damage to the economy.

Now would you like to tell us about the black hate crimes toward whites?

yes, I would like to you to tell me about those "black hate crimes toward whites"

He should also show they cause damage to the economy.

In addition to Victor's accurate rebuttal to "one crazy guy, not widespread":

This happened TODAY lmao