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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

The viable alternative is pretty obvious. Don’t renew the tax cuts and cut entitlements and defense. That’s what you have to do to get a balanced budget. You don’t get a balanced budget trimming random measly costs that might look nice but are infinitesimal parts of the budget.

But we tend to cut taxes, not substantive spending. Which is going to saddle my kids with a mess.

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What do you think the tariffs are? We've just about maxed out domestic tax. Already we're probably past the peak of the laffer curve.

The BBB contained over 4.5 trillion dollars in tax cuts and will add around 3 trillion to the US debt. It is one of the largest transfers of wealth to the corporate elite in the history of America, while removing the healthcare of tens of millions and putting half a million jobs at risk.

Tariffs will not make up for this because tariffs are, beyond specific circumstances, a failed policy that harms your own economy and disproportionately targets your lower class. It threatens US exports, makes many US businesses non-viable (thus losing jobs), slows down economy by increasing the prices of even domestic goods. Combine that with a looming recession and Trump's insistence to take over the fed fiscal policy and enforce a political bond policy...

Crashing your economy does not help reconcile debts.

Tariffs are ultimately a federal sales tax on Americans (since it translates into price increases) - which is the worse kind of tax as it's not progressive

> We've just about maxed out domestic tax.

We really haven't. The effective tax rate on the wealthiest Americans has dropped from nearly 60% to about 20% since the 1960s. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-tim...

> Already we're probably past the peak of the laffer curve.

The Laffer curve is a wildly simplistic concept that's widely disputed, and every practical test of it (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment) has demonstrated that it fails. It's the right's equivalent of "let's try Communism again!"

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