As president, trump tried to cut our already barebones welfare state

Author: n8nrgim

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He cut taxes permanently, only for the rich. Then attacked welfare which in our country Is meager. But trumpazees and magats only care about his culture of personality. and don't care about substance
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@n8nrgim

I have said before that the country is separating into intelligent people and bug people.
Fortunately you are on the intelligent side.
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@FLRW
Well it's a low bar, but at least I got that goin for me... that I'm not a bug person. lolz
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@n8nrgim
Are you angry at Biden for extending Trump's 2017 tax cuts for the rich?
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@n8nrgim
...and don't care about substance

There are 37.9 million people below the poverty line in the USA.

1.6 trillion dollars / 37.9 million = $42,216 per poor person

Now I ask you, do you really think that 1.6 trillion would have gone to help poor people? Because the math says that they wouldn't be very poor if it did. If they worked minimum wage + that benefit they would be in the 100k range (which barely squeaks by in democrat cities but that is another story)

They (the government) are stealing. The poor are receiving a tiny cut of the stolen wealth. That is the substance of the reason why informed people have absolutely no problem with Trump or anyone else slashing federal spending.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Because the math says that they wouldn't be very poor if it did.
The math says that:

1. Not all of those people are employed, so you adding the money to imaginary wages equals imaginary math.

Also, even wage of 3000$ would only equal to 36,000$ a year, which does not go into 100k when you add your imaginary value of 40k.

And the wage of people in poverty tends to go 8$ per hour. Even with 10 working hours a day, thats 80$ a day, so about 2000$ a month, not even 3000$.

2. Do you have any data on how welfare and help is distributed?

"The United States spends approximately $2.3 trillion on federal and state social programs include cash assistance, health insurance, food assistance, housing subsidies, energy and utilities subsidies, and education and childcare assistance. Similar benefits are sometimes provided by the private sector either through policy mandates or on a voluntary basis. Employer-sponsored health insurance is an example of this."

"Medicaid and CHIP Grants to States
$201,389
$266,565
Food Stamps (SNAP)
61,717
82,603
Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
40,027
55,123
Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
38,315
50,544
Housing assistance
37,205
49,739
Child Nutrition Program
13,558
20,842
Support Payments to States, TANF
28,980
20,842
Feeding Programs (WIC & CSFP)
5,695
6,671
Low Income Home Energy Assistance
2,542
3,704
Notes:
* Spending in millions of dollars"


Now do the math thing again.
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@Best.Korea
Now do the math thing again.
$2.3 trillion / 37.9 million = $60,686 per poor person
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@ADreamOfLiberty
i agree that the spending needs to be more efficient but that's a separate argument than slashing spending to people need it.

also not everyone who struggles is under the poverty line. 

a single mom makes 30k and has a couple kids, or maybe a 150% of poverty. cutting assistence to her isn't going to make everything more efficient, it's just going to make her struggle more.

your argument is that spending in inefficient therefore we should give people less basic assitance. that just ends up increasing needless suffering. 

we spend the same as other countries overall if you count private health spending and defense, we just have less social services. our social services is very basic. you want to make it even more basic, for no good reason.

you should be making arguments about how to improve the programs, not mindlessly slash spending. 
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@ADreamOfLiberty
1.6 trillion dollars / 37.9 million = $42,216 per poor person
Ah yes, the simple calculations where money magically finds poor people and teleports itself into their pockets for them to spend as they wish.

Do you deny that food stamps exist in USA?

"The numbers vary from month to month. But in April 2023, the most recent month with available figures, 41.9 million people in 22.2 million households received SNAP benefits. That translates to 12.5% of the total U.S. population.

On average, 41.2 million people in 21.6 million households received monthly SNAP benefits in the 2022 fiscal year, which ran from October 2021 through September 2022.

The program operates in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam and the Virgin Islands. A separate nutrition assistance program covers Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands."

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@ADreamOfLiberty
"They (the government) are stealing. The poor are receiving a tiny cut of the stolen wealth. That is the substance of the reason why informed people have absolutely no problem with Trump or anyone else slashing federal spending."

you admit it yourself. the poor aren't getting much if you count all the spending we do. how does it make sense to say we dont spend very wise and the poor dont get much of the benefit as it is, therefore we should help them even less? 

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@n8nrgim
Are you angry at Biden for extending Trump's 2017 tax cuts for the rich?
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@Greyparrot
"A key part of Biden's new economic policy agenda is a billionaire's tax, which would set a minimum tax for the wealthiest Americans, the White House said.

The Biden administration has offered scant details about the proposal, but it appears to closely resemble a policy that Biden put forward last March.

At that time, he called for a tax rate of at least 20% on Americans who bring in at least $100 million per year.

The tax rate would apply both to income and unrealized gains, a measure of the value a person's unsold investments have accumulated.

"President Biden is a capitalist and believes that anyone should be able to become a millionaire or a billionaire," the White House said in a statement Tuesday.

"He also believes that it is wrong for America to have a tax code that results in America's wealthiest households paying a lower tax rate than working families."

Between 2018 and 2020, the nation's wealthiest 400 families paid an average tax rate of 8%, the White House's Council of Economic Advisers found."

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@Greyparrot
"Despite the protests of some billionaires, this longstanding progressive agenda item is becoming increasingly mainstream.

Wealth inequality in the US has risen sharply in the past few decades, and the share of Americans holding an unfavorable view of billionaires has grown in the past few years.

In a 2021 analysis, ProPublica calculated that between 2014 to 2018, the 25 richest Americans — a list including Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos — paid a true tax rate of 3.4 percent on their income.

The ultra-rich can do this because most of their wealth stems from holding assets, not from wage income — and they use an array of obscure tax loopholes and accounting moves to receive a lower tax rate on their assets than they otherwise would.

According to the tax records ProPublica obtained, Musk paid zero federal income tax in 2018. Former President Donald Trump paid no federal income tax in 2020 because he reported so many business losses that year.

That’s perhaps why Biden has adopted an agenda of making billionaires pay their “fair share.”

The president’s recent attention on taxing the wealthy is a stark contrast from what he infamously told a room of wealthy donors during his presidential campaign in 2019 — that nothing would fundamentally change for them.

Since assuming office, however, Biden has professed a desire to change quite a lot for the ultra-rich in an effort to rein in wealth inequality and raise revenue for important government programs such as Social Security.

Biden’s budget plan last year contained many similar ideas as this year’s, including a 20 percent tax on households with over $100 million.

(That proposal, the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act, was introduced in the House but hasn’t been voted on.)

In his State of the Union address in February, Biden boasted that he’d passed a 15 percent minimum tax on large corporations as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

“But let’s finish the job. There’s more to do,” he said. “We have to reward work, not just wealth,” he announced, as he called for a new minimum tax on the ultra-rich."

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@n8nrgim
i agree that the spending needs to be more efficient but that's a separate argument than slashing spending to people need it.
No it isn't. Do you know how much food people have sent to central and east central Africa? Warlords stole it all. Stole it and used it as pay for their soldiers and to control the people in their territory.

Then they attack each other and if they can't hold territory they steal or burn the food there.

Those facts are not separate from the argument that we should stop sending food. It's actually propping up a pre-civil society and causing more suffering than if no aid had been sent.


also not everyone who struggles is under the poverty line. 
Hey, everybody has struggles; but if the poverty line isn't the line in the sand where people need a social safety net then we need a better poverty line.

Of course when the economy is constantly shrunk by the stealing that poverty line will keep getting higher and higher.


a single mom makes 30k and has a couple kids, or maybe a 150% of poverty. cutting assistence to her isn't going to make everything more efficient, it's just going to make her struggle more.
Actually it would make everything more efficient given the premise that what benefits she receives are in the context of 75%+ waste.

In other words, even for her, it would be better in the long term if the government didn't steal that money on her behalf because jobs would pay more and prices would stay lower. 30k at 1930 prices is more than enough.


your argument is that spending in inefficient therefore we should give people less basic assitance. that just ends up increasing needless suffering.
That is not the lesson history tells. When we produce more less people need "basic assistance".

When we sacrifice production efficiency the avoidable suffering increases on timescales from 5-infinity years.


we spend the same as other countries overall if you count private health spending and defense, we just have less social services.
So the same is stolen from us (not exactly true as it doesn't include the inflation-debt theft mechanism), but we (specifically our poor) get less help than other countries.

I think you're absolutely right about that.

What you're completely wrong about is the assumption that if the water pressure is too low, you just need a bigger pump. If there is a leak and you keep pumping until you're back up to full pressure you'll simply tear the leak wider.

The various tiers of government in the USA are broken. Hopelessly corrupt. They cannot be trusted. They are as leaky as a strainer and they became this way because failure and corruption have been rewarded (especially by democrats) for a century (since the new deal).

In many cases the money they steal in the name of helping people is used to prevent those people from being helped since if there was an efficient way to help then they would lose their excuse to steal.

The perfect example of that are departments of education vs charter schools. Schools which have a profound record of success and have done more to end poverty in deep blue democrat cities than all their social programs combined.

I'll repeat that: The government which is being paid to educate children is using stolen money to attack private organizations that educate children better than they do.


you should be making arguments about how to improve the programs
1.) Stop stealing. Doing good via evil never ends well.
2.) Start over, there is nothing worth reforming in the existing social programs. They are all monuments to waste, grift, and petty tyranny
3.) Never create a social structure where failure is rewarded. If the goal is to help people who have fallen on hard times, then the system must reward workers and divisions at every level in proportion to how much they actually helped the unfortunate. No one who is suffering should be paid to keep 'suffering'.
4.) Pursuant to (3) a continuous UBI is a simple solution that holds little risk of corruption. Don't try to figure out who is mooching and who is trying their best.
5.) The political power of potential parasites must be neutralized lest a vicious cycle of increasing parasitism form. Easy solution: People on UBI have no vote.


not mindlessly slash spending.
Does it really seem like I haven't thought about this a bit? Mindless? Really?

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@ADreamOfLiberty
Now I ask you, do you really think that 1.6 trillion would have gone to help poor people? Because the math says that they wouldn't be very poor if it did. If they worked minimum wage + that benefit they would be in the 100k range
The $1.6 trillion is over a ten year period.
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@Double_R
Now I ask you, do you really think that 1.6 trillion would have gone to help poor people? Because the math says that they wouldn't be very poor if it did. If they worked minimum wage + that benefit they would be in the 100k range
The $1.6 trillion is over a ten year period.
Then this supposed cut was 1/10th as severe as implied.

 The spending is on the order of a trillion per year.

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@Best.Korea
Are you angry at Biden for extending Trump's 2017 tax cuts for the rich?

He has been in office 3 years and has done pretty much nothing about the Trump tax cuts for the rich except for empty promises....

Yet one surprise about the new tax law accompanying the InflationReductionAct is not yet making headlines. In passing their own version of tax reform, the Democrats left the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) completely intact, despite five years of promises to repeal it. No less than President Biden himself made a campaign promise that “on day one, I will move to eliminate Trump’s tax cuts.” 

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@n8nrgim
Are you angry at Biden for extending Trump's 2017 tax cuts for the rich?
Another lie by our resident liar.

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@Best.Korea
As a Democrat, how does it feel to be lied to for 5 straight years about tax policy?
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Biden also lied to the American people when he ran for Vice President in 2008 when he repeatedly said he would not support any form of any tax that imposed even “one single penny” of tax increase on anyone making less than $250,000. Biden shattered that promise immediately upon taking office.
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@Greyparrot
Are you angry at Biden for extending Trump's 2017 tax cuts for the rich?
He didn't genius, the tax cuts don't expire so there is no need to be extended. What Biden had said it's that he wants to extend them to households making less than $400k while raising taxes on households making more. It's the "making more" part where the parties disagree.

This is really basic stuff you should know if you're going to keep trying to spread this nonsense.
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@Greyparrot
Biden also lied to the American people when he ran for Vice President in 2008 when...
"Read my lips, no news taxes".

Wow a politician backing down from a campaign promise, how unthinkable...
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@Double_R
the tax cuts don't expire..
He promised to repeal them. He broke his promise.


Political rhetoric about raising taxes on the rich primarily serves as a distraction from the United States’ fiscal reality. If spending is not constrained, large and growing deficits will remain even after taxes are raised on corporations and the wealthy. The only way to significantly increase revenue is by raising taxes on a broader swath of middle‐income Americans.

Talking points like those President Biden routinely uses about the rich not paying their fair share in taxes have historically provided political cover to raise taxes on other segments of the population...
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@Greyparrot
Inciting jealousy is an age-old manipulation. The concept which people should be paying attention to is this: The beneficiaries of the deep state don't care if they're taxed heavily, so long as they're paid more.
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He promised to repeal them. He broke his promise.
That’s a lie. 

Most of the Trump tax cuts went to very rich individuals and corporations.

That’s the part he wants to repeal. But Biden inherited an economy in recession thanks to Trump’s poor response to Covid. 

It wouldn’t make any sense to raise taxes on corporations at the same time the government was giving corporations money, like the airlines, to stay afloat and not lay people off.

“Biden said he would remove a limitation that Mr. Trump placed on the deduction of state and local taxes from federal income taxes, known as S.A.L.T., a move that primarily hurt higher-income residents of high-tax states like New York and California.”

This was a deliberate tax increase on blue state Americans by Trump, the people who pay for all the losers in red states who can’t earn. Democrats should respond by raising taxes on Red State Americans. Let’s start with taxing farmers, or simply stop giving farmers welfare checks.


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Biden also lied to the American people when he ran for Vice President in 2008 when he repeatedly said he would not support any form of any tax that imposed even “one single penny” of tax increase on anyone making less than $250,000. Biden shattered that promise immediately upon taking office.
Bullshit. Trump doubled the standard deduction but eliminated personal exemptions. It was a wash for a family with one child.

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@ADreamOfLiberty
Inciting jealousy is an age-old manipulation.
Yep, but the weak minded partisan cults just have no ability to see it.
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@FLRW
Yep. Is it nearing the time when the bugs will require extermination.
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@zedvictor4
Politicians have been promising to tax the rich for as long as they have had a mouth to speak and a pen to sign. Yet nothing changes. Ever.

The real bugs are in DC.
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@zedvictor4
Yep. Is it nearing the time when the bugs will require extermination.
Two guys in spiderman masks calling each other nazis, except one side says things like this. Didn't someone on this forum recently imply that failure to denounce is equivalent to endorsement?

Anyone want to denounce? Didn't think so.