-
Friendly reminder: The politics section is a place where a lot of differing opinions are raised. You may not like what you read here but it is someone's opinion. As long as the debate is respectful you are free to debate freely. Also, the views and opinions expressed by forum members may not necessarily reflect those of GBAtemp. Messages that the staff consider offensive or inflammatory may be removed in line with existing forum terms and conditions.
Who should pay for the US/Mexican wall?
- Thread starter Taleweaver
- Start date
- Views 14,169
- Replies 162
- Likes 5
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2013
- Messages
- 17,748
- Trophies
- 3
- Location
- The Lands Between
- Website
- gbatemp.net
- XP
- 8,549
- Country
You'd be surprised how much funding for everything else would be available if we'd just stop giving everything away to the rich. Besides, illegal immigration is at the lowest rate it has ever been, and illegals contribute more to the economy than they take out. Your assumption is that illegals are a massive drain on the system, but our inefficient education and healthcare systems are a far bigger drain on themselves than anything else.
And you're still ignoring that no one said "Open borders.", Most undocumented immigrants don't come in through the southern boarder... No wall has EVER worked, the environmental and economic damages along the boarder... The fact that the wall would have to be several miles inside either the Mexico Border, OR the US border... Not ON the border. The cost of the wall yearly which would well exceed the 5.7b or whatever he wants now.. Not to mention even THAT is a drop in the bucket to the cost of building the wall.
Besides... Trump is SUPPOSEDLY so rich, and SUPPOSEDLY wants this so badly.. He can pay for the fucking thing himself.
He still hasn't released his tax returns.
Also his fucking wall can be cut by a damn household saw!
Besides... Trump is SUPPOSEDLY so rich, and SUPPOSEDLY wants this so badly.. He can pay for the fucking thing himself.
He still hasn't released his tax returns.
Also his fucking wall can be cut by a damn household saw!
Last edited by Tigran,
I mentioned earlier that the rich Americans are the highest contributors to government revenue. Also you're now advocating for illegal immigration so obviously you wouldn't support a wall, which is okay. I'm pretty sure Trump won't back down when it comes to border security so it's going to be a bumpy ride.
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2013
- Messages
- 17,748
- Trophies
- 3
- Location
- The Lands Between
- Website
- gbatemp.net
- XP
- 8,549
- Country
I'm not advocating anything, I stated the facts. And they better be the highest contributors, the 1% has far more wealth than the other 99% of Americans combined. It doesn't mean they're actually paying their fair share between ludicrous tax cuts (like Trump slashing the corporate tax rate in half), offshore tax havens, and massive corporate welfare in the form of subsidies. I'm sure all the biggest welfare states combined don't even cost us annually what subsidies for one large corporation do.
Last edited by Xzi,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...xpayers-paid-majority-of-income-taxes-in-2016
Tax breaks or not, they still hold the country up by paying the most into taxes.
Uh, no they're not mutually exclusive. About half of social programs are funded by taxes at a flat rate upon income earned*. This means that the best way to fund social programs is to have higher paying jobs on a broad base of the population. An open border doesn't push wages down unless there's a glut of supply of workers and even then only so long as minimum wage laws are ignored. For the former, one could argue that there's a glut of supply of workers substantial enough that open borders immigration would have little to no effect--look at the US's relatively open border position when it comes to doctors and yet the US has one of the highest pay rates on doctors. For the latter, well, that's more a problem of a system designed to in theory discourage illegal immigration but in practice to allow abuse of illegal immigrants. If we wanted to actual focus on discouraging the hiring of illegal immigrants, we'd go after employers who do that.
I'm actually for open borders. One would have much more solid argument if you were talking about state taxes and state programs, especially education, but most the US has an ass backwards broken property tax based system for local funding which is again is ass backwards broken. Being from a lower property neighborhood shouldn't translate into having a less well funded education. Further, federal efforts (NCLB and Common Core) have been cluster fucks because of the nature of their design. My point is, the programs under federal control should be sustainable with open borders. The ones under state control are various levels of shit by state design, which has little to do with immigration policy.
Granted, although I always hate when journalists report "income tax" and ignore the obvious: if you make relatively little income, it's payroll taxes that fund social programs which make up the substantial amount of your federal taxes. It's the progressive income tax that of course causes the 1% to pay substantial more income tax than the bottom 90% (or bottom 50%) precisely because there's no means one could tax the bottom 50% at any rate that they'd be able to substantially contribute to the social and non-social spending the federal government engages in.
Now, if you want to argue for changing federal government spending to resolve some of these funding/taxing discrepancies, I'm all ears. IMHO, EITC should be gotten rid of as well as federal housing assistance--that really should be dealt with at the state level or at least be something the states pay into and be federally managed. SNAPs is agricultural subsidies and should be probably taken out of military spending--it's intended to be a strategy of guaranteed overproduction of food for security reasons. Military spending itself could be greatly decreased, which needs to happen anyways because the spending to funding ratio is way off.
So, yes, the very rich are a substantial part of what keeps the country afloat. That functionally can't change in any government. Efforts to close tax loopholes (including with corporations)** would improve the funding to spending ratio, but it obviously isn't nearly enough. Immigration is something that should be resolved but more for the recognition of human rights***. If we want to tie many social benefits to citizenship and limit citizenship, so be it; we already do that, and I don't really have much problem with it so long as we make citizenship a reasonably achievable goal for most people.
* Ignoring that some taxes have a cap which effectively makes the tax regressive after a certain income.
** For all the talk of people moving, there's a reason why very rich people still live in the US and pay substantial taxes. It's not out of the goodness of their heart. It's that most other equally western countries where they'd have ready access to the means of their wealth have much greater tax ratios. There's a lot of room to move before they would bulk in leave the country, just as it's lots of hyperbole when people said they'd leave the country if Trump were elected.
*** The world has become globalized, so it's reasonable to expect that people with the basic right to travel should be able to travel to follow work, wherever that may be. In the short term there's always hiccups with such an approach, but it's literally the foundation of how the US became the diverse and powerful country that it is. Or should we go back to wanting to lynching all the Irish, Italians, Chinese, etc that dared to come and have children here?
What it would do is put the nation into more debt over the literal years that will be required to build it and waste more money to station more people around it. What it won't do is stop people from using boats to get around it.
Last edited by The Catboy,
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2013
- Messages
- 17,748
- Trophies
- 3
- Location
- The Lands Between
- Website
- gbatemp.net
- XP
- 8,549
- Country
Don't worry, Republicans will be back to hand-wringing about the debt just as soon as a Democrat is president again.
Republicans hand-wring more about spending than actual debt. Or tax and spend, which apparently as some sort of potentially sound fiscal policy is of course the ideals of the devil, the Democrats. Don't worry, though. One way or another, some small bit of the wall will be built--even if it's just upkeep on the current sections of wall across the border. Then, of course, Republicans will joyously announce that with all the money saved from all the stopped illegal immigration--based on figures quintuple counting (by overlapping sets) a variety of hypotheticals--we all deserve a tax cut. And by "we" I mean "the top income bracket".
Build that wall!, Build that wall!.
The cost to the US economy due to the government being shut down - is nearly what the wall would have cost. Probably President Trump should have just got the money in the first place and saved the Taxpayer a whole heap of cash.
I think that Trump has has a pretty bum deal with being president so far, I don't ever recall any other president getting the amount of crap and biased news outlets running fake stories, or being investigated as much as he has been - and all to tarnish him.
Personally I think Hilary Clinton should be in prison, but you don't see the same level of outrage conducted towards her - and she's broken the law. Any other citizen that did what she had done would be spending years in a federal penitentiary.
I'm not from the US - so it's not an issue I need concern myself about, however with a population of over 325 million people - you 'only' had a choice between Clinton or Trump - it just shows that money talks and the world is run by the rich, as there are thousands upon thousands of smarter people than those two morons.
If you think anyone here's opinion on the wall makes a blind bit of difference you're sadly mistaken. The same thing is happening in the UK - we voted to leave the EU - but the money men are trying to overturn the vote. Democracy is an illusion, and if you think otherwise, your mistaken.
The cost to the US economy due to the government being shut down - is nearly what the wall would have cost. Probably President Trump should have just got the money in the first place and saved the Taxpayer a whole heap of cash.
I think that Trump has has a pretty bum deal with being president so far, I don't ever recall any other president getting the amount of crap and biased news outlets running fake stories, or being investigated as much as he has been - and all to tarnish him.
Personally I think Hilary Clinton should be in prison, but you don't see the same level of outrage conducted towards her - and she's broken the law. Any other citizen that did what she had done would be spending years in a federal penitentiary.
I'm not from the US - so it's not an issue I need concern myself about, however with a population of over 325 million people - you 'only' had a choice between Clinton or Trump - it just shows that money talks and the world is run by the rich, as there are thousands upon thousands of smarter people than those two morons.
If you think anyone here's opinion on the wall makes a blind bit of difference you're sadly mistaken. The same thing is happening in the UK - we voted to leave the EU - but the money men are trying to overturn the vote. Democracy is an illusion, and if you think otherwise, your mistaken.
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2013
- Messages
- 17,748
- Trophies
- 3
- Location
- The Lands Between
- Website
- gbatemp.net
- XP
- 8,549
- Country
You have your own very obvious bias if you believe any of the investigations into the Trump administration have been opened for the sole purpose of 'tarnishing Trump.' He does a more than sufficient job of tarnishing his own reputation on a daily basis with tweets that have terrible grammar, spelling, and random capitalization. The very act of personally running a Twitter account is well beneath the office of president, but he's obviously committed so many more serious faux pas that we're naturally all numb to it by now.
What a surprise, one is "too many investigations" for Trump, but after like twenty investigations into Clinton that turned up nothing, still "too few investigations" into her.
I hope you realize that Ivanka and the Trump administration are guilty of not only the same 'e-mail crimes,' but much worse crimes as well, including doxxing American citizens.
I specifically became a US citizen last year so that I wouldnt be billed for the wall as a mexican.
You mean like "lock her up"?
Anyway, you would think people would be tired of buttery males already.
I think you're missing the point - you've a country of over 350 million people, and these two buffoons are the best two people your country could get to run it. Clinton is as bad as Trump - if not worse, but it's not a competition. Clinton is a criminal and Trump lacks any empathy and is border line psychopath.
You basically had a choice between electing a turd sandwich and a giant douche - not because they were good leaders, but because they came from family's with lots of money. If you think either of these two twonks wanted to run the country for the benefit of the people, you're mistaken. They wanted to run the country for their own ego and to get some more wealth.
That's actually a very interesting article. But these statistics don't really mean what you think it means. It has two crucial flaws:
1) the richest tax payers aren't automatically the richest persons. Multinationals and large firms shift their capital around to the countries where taxes are lower (that's the benefit of being very rich: you can afford a bookkeeper to do all these things for you and - even with his wages included - still come up ahead).
2) since income taxes are income percentage based...what exactly does that say on inequality in the USA? You look at those numbers and say that the top 1% should have equal say over the country because they contribute as much to the income taxes as the bottom 90%. I say that the bottom 90% should earn more so their contributions to the income taxes will raise.
Not convinced? Look some more. And shiver...
The average tax rates paid for the very wealthiest has fallen in recent years from a peak of 24.1 percent in 2013 to 22.9 on 2016 and was a full four percentage points below the 26.9 percent that the top one percent paid on average.
This drop of 1.2 percent may not sound like much, but this is in the category that payed as much as the bottom NINETY percent.
In numbers...in 2016, the top 1% payed 3.8046 trillion dollars (10.2*37.3%=). Subtract 1.2% of it, and you've got 0.0456552 trillion dollars, or 45.6552 billion dollars. Basically: NOT having this drop would've meant that this stupid wall could've been build already.
And now for the scary part:
The most extensive rewrite of the U.S. tax code in more than 30 years was signed in law in early 2018. Individuals may start to feel the effects of last year’s tax overhaul when they file their returns in April. Estimates show the law’s biggest benefits go to top earners.
The article doesn't state the percentage drop, but assuming (pretty conservatively) that it's in the same area...it means that if Trump didn't push this extensive rewrite through, then he would have had the budget for it coming April.
Or in other words: last year, Trump already took away as much as the price of a gigantic wall away from the 90% lowest tax payers away from the economy. Do you want to pay a similar price again this year?
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2013
- Messages
- 17,748
- Trophies
- 3
- Location
- The Lands Between
- Website
- gbatemp.net
- XP
- 8,549
- Country
37 indictments and 7 convictions from the Trump administration so far. We've just learned over the last few days that Manafort personally handed Trump campaign polling data to Russian intelligence, and that Trump has been trying to keep records of meetings with Putin secret from even his own officials. He didn't even deny being a Russian asset on Fox News, of all friendly outlets.
You're absolutely delusional if you think any of this would be happening with Clinton as president. She even called out all of this criminality very specifically during the debates.
Last edited by Xzi,
Similar threads
-
-
-
-
@
CameronCataclysm:
Why no blog posts about Nitendont going after Garry's Mod repos that have been up for a decade or 2? -
-
-
@
Xdqwerty:
Is it safe to update a modded ps3?
Can I play online in pirated games? (with ps3hen either enabled or not) -
-
-
-
-
-
@
Xdqwerty:
@salazarcosplay, I used apollo save tool to activate my ps3 offline so i could play a game that wasnt working
-
S @ salazarcosplay:from what I understood. you load up the piratged game. you the clear the syscalls, then you play
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
