Please Don't Show Us Another “Typical Family Earning $270,000 a Year”

Wayne and Brent Gretzky hold the National Hockey League record for most combined points by two brothers:

Wayne Gretzky with 2,857, Brent Gretzky with 4.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/actually-the-average-famil...

I always think, how can they be average if they own a whole house?!

Aside from th fact that "average more often" doesnt make sense (do you mean more common?), its still not excusable because the data is so easily available. The county with the highest median household income isnt even half that (Loudoun County, VA at $115k), and Santa Clara county, home of most of "Silicon Valley" and a place many Americans would probably think as a home of a lot of high income families is 14th on the list at ~$91k/year [0]. A slightly older, longer list doesnt even put San Francisco in the top 100 counties.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...

In this case relative price level means nothing at all. It's all about job security, opportunity and margin. You comment about the difference of $1k is all about margin.

Even setting aside all that, that these tax cuts are functionally useless except as a transfer of wealth to monied interests, they expire in ten years besides. It's a more complex problem than what a calculator can really express without losing the ability to give a Nice Shiny Number out the other end.

The bigger issue is that, for example, the Walton family alone will get 5% of the 1.5 trillion dollar tax break. The Trump family will get a huge break too. It's unlikely that the Walton family or the Trump family will suddenly start making a ton of economic activity because of their windfalls, but in the meantime government revenue is down, which means they have to start cutting services.

So most of the tax breaks for the lower earners will be eaten up over the next few years in paying for things the government used to subsidize for them.

How about someone making $75k/yr. who itemizes deductions, because they live in a high-property-tax state? Or someone making $75k/yr. who has 5 kids and receives an exemption for all of them under the current code?

We could go on all day coming up with scenarios that are missing from tables like these, some which represent winners, some which represent losers (somehow, that table seems to have no losers...). There are bigger issues with the bill. There are a bunch of hidden traps for the middle class that people are just beginning to understand. Already there are concerns about the new provision allowing 529 plans to be used for private elementary schools, and the way that will create incentives that hurt the middle class while benefiting the wealthy. The bill also picks winners and losers by allowing some professions to use pass-through corporations to reduce their income tax burden, but not others (architects and engineers, but not software developers).

$165k houshold income puts them barely outside the top 10% of households, though [0]. Its not unrealistic, per se (its not the top 1%, for example), but ~90% of households make less than that, so its not particularly useful, either.

[0] https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-pe...

Most news outlets also stand to benefit significantly because it is primarily a tax cut for businesses.

Matches right up with their reader demographics actually. News readership self-selects for higher income regardless of partisanship.

If you limit state taxes there should be a net migration to lower cost states.

In general I think the tax changes are bad for most people in the long term but high income earners probably skew toward professions who might be able to set up corporations and get the pass through rate on some of their income.

[1] As an aside, people rightfully rip on military spending waste a lot, but it is still a decently functioning jobs program.

Glad to see i'm not the only one that questioned it.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/realestate/ct-biz-h...

There is a statement about the need to get over oneself somewhere in there, but finding it is an exercise for the reader.

I remember reading about how Japan was desperate to increase inflation a bit and then they raised the VAT or something like that - and I was bewildered at why they were shocked that inflation promptly wilted further.

It's disheartening that you hear more about a national sales tax/VAT rather than trying to go in the other direction and eliminate sales taxes, not to mention making capital gains rates the same as all other income.

This is completely true.

The reason the top half pay all the taxes is the top half have all the goddamned money. And that, of course, makes sense: the top half have the only realistic chance at accumulating enough labor-derived money to buy into capital and they've been doing exactly that for the last fifty years. Capital is not linear per-hour. Capital is a multiplier. That's why they have all the money. That they have all the money is the core and the source of the mess we're dealing with right now.

Which means there is another question to be asked: should taxes be lowered? As someone very firmly in that top half, I am benefited by having people in the lower half of the income distribution not starving and dying in the streets, not dying of easily preventable injuries and illnesses, and not being so crushed by debt that revolution looks appealing.

So are you. It's not about you, and it's not about me, but it's about us. We need to do better by us, so we can all keep this thing ticking along.

And I gotta say, it's important not to miss that even that Bloomberg article elides a really, really important question: how much of that net $915 from that hypothetical renter now goes to (poorly) covering for the cuts in other services that will be necessitated to avoid budgetary disaster? It's a hard question, because nobody really knows, but it's a question whose answer will impact the people at the bottom of the income distribution the most, by far.

Well, you could try reading some analyses of the bill, which are pretty clear about what they're saying:

>By 2027, more than half of all Americans — 53 percent — would pay more in taxes under the tax bill agreed to by House and Senate Republicans, a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center finds. That year, 82.8 percent of the bill’s benefit would go to the top 1 percent.....In 2018, the bill is an across-the-board cut for all income groups, but the biggest cuts are reserved for the upper middle class

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/18/16791174/...

And your last line is a non sequiter, because there are many taxes that are not personal income tax - some of them are even dealt with in this specific bill.

Edit: I didn't downvote you, but I was tempted to because I can't imagine that you don't actually know that the bill contains temporary tax cuts for most people and permanent tax cuts for the very wealthy, so it reads as though you are building a strawman.

Also, provisions such as repealing the individual health insurance mandate lead to an increase in other expenses, though admittedly those are not federal taxes. I work for a health insurance company, and earlier this year the company filed with the state regulators to say there might be close to a 50% hike in premiums, depending on whether or not the individual mandate was repealed. Whatever your feelings are about that politically, the increase in premiums will be real and directly related to that bill, and the money is fungible so people can't be blamed if they consider it an increase.

One more thing, a deficit funded tax cut today means a tax increase tomorrow to pay for principal+interest. People could be thinking of that when they say their taxes will go up.