Here's how your take-home pay could change if Trump's new tax plan is passed
Hmm....I keep wanting to believe that a plain 10% "flat Tax" would be the best way to do this, since the looters ARE going to loot, no matter what. All of this "talk" keeps adding up to just making the smoke a different color and making the mirrors more polished. It still is a game where you have to try to "out loot the looters" using all their weird gambits and tricks. There is still way too much money to be taken by keeping the current system, and all the "donations" it causes to be made, to political campaigns.
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In the artificially accelerated fictional plot, John Galt talked to the best and most moral key producers individually as they were suddenly and dramatically clobbered. The worst of the looters disappeared as no threat. Even Hank Rearden's tribunal cowered and surrendered to a speech. A small minority withdrew their minds and the whole country collapsed. It was romantic fiction with extremes in abstract form. The fictional plot is not the way this world works and not a basis for arguing for a strike.
The mortgage interest deduction is supported by anyone who would otherwise pay higher taxes, just like any deduction or any lower rate. As long as rates are high that battle will continue for obvious reasons that are not inadvertent. Defending lower taxes is not a "swamp" with mysterious "implicit alignments of swamp interests" somehow acting like a conspiracy of evil bankers that otherwise can't be found.
In some cases like California the property tax spending was limited through a maze of rules, so the state policies effectively circumvented it with massive increases in state subsidies to the cities and towns, resulting in higher state taxes and more state control over local affairs. This is the typical result everywhere when property taxes are limited by whatever means.
If only a particular tax is limited, or only property valuations or mil rates are limited, there will always be another tax to keep the total spending and taxes up.
The answer to that is not to try to wreck the economy and that is not what Ayn Rand advocated. If the current system collapses it will bring an "end" all right, after which it will be worse. The tension in the plot between Dagny and the strikers was put there by Ayn Rand for the purpose of the book; it has nothing to do with the fact collapse is not a solution and does not in logic support trying to do it. The strike and the return of the strikers unopposed were fiction.
An unfortunate side effect of tax reductions is that as people earn more, government collects more in total revenue than before the tax reduction. Republicans like that and claim it is the justification of the tax reductions; never mentioning that it is our money and the goal of tax cuts is so we keep it, not give more to them. Then they squeeze the taxes up again over time until there is another backlash as they strive to maximize the take and the controls.
One major reason that there are so many complicated rules for deductions, depreciations, etc. is that different kinds of personal and business situations are hit differently and to different degrees by the high taxes. Of course people clamor for deductions. What else can they do when there is no hope of lowering taxes and government spending? It is the other side of the pressure group warfare of the welfare state: pressure group self defense. It is not an excuse to denounce mortgages as "slavery" and banking as a sinister force. Simply repeating over and over that the deductions people want are really a banking conspiracy is unconvincing.
Trump is oblivious to all of this and thinks people want "simplification" by eliminating their deductions. He's too stupid to realize that if we were willing to pay even higher taxes for "simplification" we could already do that by ignoring all the paper work and "simply" paying more taxes than we have to. Or perhaps he thinks we are too stupid to realize it.
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