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> Apparently half the country is buying into a narrative that their tax bills are going to go up, and I'm not sure where that idea is coming from.

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.

> By 2027, more than half of all Americans — 53 percent — would pay more in taxes

Grossly misleading because the expiring tax cuts for individuals are an accounting trick and they will almost certainly be extended.

> At this point, there is no way of having a reduction in tax bills that doesn't overwhelming favor the top 50% of earners

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.

> 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.

Yes, I think that is the main point, and what we should be talking about. I feel like as a country we have lost the ability to have a discussion at that level of depth. So instead we dumb down our arguments to the point where we mislead people just so they will accept our point of view.

I agree with that.

I would also note that there is a real and a mendacious reason for why we have lost that ability.

>> At this point, there is no way of having a reduction in tax bills that doesn't overwhelming favor the top 50% of earners

>This is completely true.

I think there are plenty of ways to go about restructuring taxes that make this false. Any jiggering you do with the lower brackets for lowering their rate can be equally compensated by the top brackets starting a few thousand dollars earlier.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but the poor don't pay much (income) taxes on the first place--cutting them to get to those sorts of numbers may be a negative income tax rate. As I understand it, the problem is pretty dumb to have: the imbalance is such that, without significant improvements and expansions of governmental services, there's no money to extract.

We have a hand-to-mouth debt peasantry in this country. It's stark once you start digging into the numbers.

It could be that people with capital have all the money because capital gains rates are significantly lower than earned income rates. Maybe we could adjust that so as not to continue distorting the economy?

I am not an economist (minor in undergrad, but whatever), but intuitively this sounds like a fair action to take. I'm exactly in the class of Americans who will be capital owners (and I have a leg up, I work in tech, we're the only people who turn labor into capital with such a miniscule overhead), I'm pretty okay with paying my way.

I wonder if equalizing rates would harm the software industry though - maybe the entire information economy as we know it is largely a product of the discrimination against labor leading to overinvestment in the industry with the highest returns per person. I can also see equalizing rates crashing the prices of investment assets. If it's worth doing in the first place (because the distortion is large) then it is necessarily going to be disruptive.

For all we know, not favoring capital only delays the singularity...

I am really very comfortable with the notion of "delaying" a theoretical but probably wrong event in favor of helping real people who exist now.

Many people correctly surmise that the benefits to individuals are temporary and will sunset, after which their taxes will be higher than when they started.

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.

> benefits to individuals are temporary and will sunset, after which their taxes will be higher

highly unlikely. they will be extended.

> a deficit funded tax cut today means a tax increase tomorrow to pay for principal+interest

no, it means the government creates more money. the deficits are never being paid back, ever. it is mathematically impossible.

It's mathematically impossible to pay back a "deficit" in general I think, once the time period in which it occurred is over. But more to the point, the deficit and the debt are important despite the fact that the debt is not expected or desired to be paid off. In order to maintain our way of life, the growth of the debt needs to approximate the growth of the economy in the long run, and be reduced if it overshoots. This is a concept I rather think some conservatives have given lip service to in the past. Are you one of the "fiscally responsible conservatives" I used to read about? The idea that there is a middle ground between hyperinflation and paying the debt off isn't terribly difficult, I would've thought.

I am not a conservative at all, but I can do basic math, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that the federal government's debts will never be paid back.

If the US federal government is well run, there is no reason to pay the debt off, as a liquid market for treasuries is beneficial, and the debt can grow forever with the economy...and if the government is poorly run, it would presumably default at some point.

So while I more or less agree it is at least 99.9% certain the debt will not be paid off, I feel like you are making some implicit point with your comment about "basic math" and "100% certainty" that I would not agree with. Why belabour the obvious?

If there was some reason the debt needed to be paid off, I don't see why in principle the US couldn't stop running deficits, as we have oscillated between trillion dollar deficits and much smaller ones.

I think those estimates were based on this result from the JCT, "Distributional Effects Of The Conference Agreement For H.R.1" https://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=5054 An example article: https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/jct-estimates-amen...