The Republican Agenda 2021 and Forward

Herdfan said:
For you and I to imagine it, not hard at all.

But there are many, including some on this forum, that can not. They can not envision a world where people make decisions about where to live based on financial or quality of life considerations.

But as you noted, it is happening. Wealthy are moving from high tax states to low tax states and leaving budget holes in their wake. They are leaving crime-ridden cities for places where QoL is higher. Where they can go to the store, pick things off the shelf (ie not locked up) and go out to their car which hasn't been broken into and go home.

COVID has exacerbated this trend as more and more people can WFH. So they are now deciding where home is going to be. I am having dinner tonight with a buddy from college. He is originally from NJ and went back there after college to work. He now is WFH and he and his wife sold their home in NJ and are traveling around the country checking out places they may want to live. They stay a month or so and move on. So his taxes are no longer going to NJ.

People who thought they had to be in a certain city for their career are now free to move away.

I don't know whether some people either don't want to believe it is happening because they can't envision it, or they know deep down it is happening but will assign 100 reasons in their minds because they don't want the real ones to be true.
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People have always migrated to improve their status, whether it was because of climate, economic conditions, or any one of hundreds of other things that are important to them. The ability to geographically decouple the workplace from home has increased the possibilities, though folks at the lower end of the economic ladder, especially in service industries, have been less able to benefit. But while tax rates are a determinant, quality of life also includes considerations such state policies regarding abortion, transgender care, and book banning, to name just three.
 
If the tax rate was ZERO across the board, the hustlers would then demand a peasant tax because zero ain't low enough, I'm looking for a negative tax rate in which Uncle Same provides me with residual income - preferably the more I make, the more they have to pay me.

Now that I think about it, that's kind of what we have now.
 
Roller said:
People have always migrated to improve their status, whether it was because of climate, economic conditions, or any one of hundreds of other things that are important to them. The ability to geographically decouple the workplace from home has increased the possibilities, though folks at the lower end of the economic ladder, especially in service industries, have been less able to benefit. But while tax rates are a determinant, quality of life also includes considerations such state policies regarding abortion, transgender care, and book banning, to name just three.
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Plus the supposed lower cost of living elsewhere has a shelf life. It doesn’t take long for the highly paid to learn about the new low cost hot spot and then they all move there and quickly raise the cost of living. Maybe only then do they step off their front porch and open their eyes to everything else they signed up for in the quest for a cheaper cost of living.
 
Alli said:
It Would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.
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The Trump dichotomy. Endless humor mixed with endless confusion and despair - laughing as we circle the toilet bowl drain to fascism.

It wasn't the "F*** Yeah, 'MURICA!" Trump supporters who frightened me, it was the very nice folks who spoke politely and cordially, explaining why they think Trump is Jesus 2.0 and the perfect messenger from God to get this country back to whatever era they consider it to have been great.
 
Roller said:
People have always migrated to improve their status, whether it was because of climate, economic conditions, or any one of hundreds of other things that are important to them. The ability to geographically decouple the workplace from home has increased the possibilities, though folks at the lower end of the economic ladder, especially in service industries, have been less able to benefit. But while tax rates are a determinant, quality of life also includes considerations such state policies regarding abortion, transgender care, and book banning, to name just three.
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For some sure.

Others are looking for, in some cases, the exact opposite.

My top 3 are:

1) Reasonable Taxes - Do we get what we pay for and is there as little waste as possible

2) Reasonable Government - Is the government overbearing? Do they think about what and why they are doing something. COVID really showed a difference between governments. For example MI banned people from buying certain items in a store they were already in, CA arrested a paddleboarder out in the ocean without anyone within 100 yards of him - these are not reasonable. Other states had mask mandates - and while I didn't like them, they were reasonable.

3) Crime and public safety - Are criminals held accountable? Is my car going to be broken into if I park it on the street outside my house. Can I use my 2A rights to protect me and my family?

I think #1 is a bigger issue than the Dems want it to be. Why does CA need to tax income at 13% (Top) and NY at 9% (Top) while FL and TX are at 0%? Granted FL has high property taxes, but a person can choose to some degree how much they want to pay by where they choose to live and the size house they choose to have regardless of income. But what does one get from the government in CA that they don't get in FL for their tax dollars, social issues aside.
 
Herdfan said:
I think #1 is a bigger issue than the Dems want it to be. Why does CA need to tax income at 13% (Top) and NY at 9% (Top) while FL and TX are at 0%? Granted FL has high property taxes, but a person can choose to some degree how much they want to pay by where they choose to live and the size house they choose to have regardless of income. But what does one get from the government in CA that they don't get in FL for their tax dollars, social issues aside.
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Different states issue taxes differently, so it's not a clear 1:1 comparison, and this is a bit disingenuous to only look at income taxes. Texas and Washington have one thing in common: our revenues are driven by sales taxes, and both are regressive taxes in the sense that lower income earners are generally hit harder by them than upper class earners. However, unlike Texas, Washington doesn't have fossil fuel reserves that generate revenue for the state (~10% of Texas' tax revenue). So natural resources whose extraction can be taxed can be used as a way to shift the debt burden.

If we look at a basic breakdown of revenues reported by each state's comptrollers for 2023, there's a more interesting picture being painted. For Texas, 85 billion in taxes were pulled in, with sales taxes being 55% of that (over 45 billion). Motor Vehicle Sales + Rental taxes add about 7 billion onto that. Oil and gas production taxes are about 8 billion, with franchise taxes not being far behind. Having the natural resources account for nearly 10% of the total tax revenue does help reduce the burdens a little. I imagine receiving nearly 70b in federal dollars helps a bit here too (not reported as tax revenue, clearly, but part of another 127b in revenues reported by the state for 2023).

California reported 93 billion in total revenues. Less than 10% more than Texas' tax revenue, but California's revenue is almost entirely taxes. The vast majority of that being income tax (55b) and corporation taxes (16b). The corporation taxes are interestingly similar to the tax revenue from fossil fuels and the franchise tax, so at least at a high level, things look similar on the corporate side of things, just how that money is raised is different in part due to the lack of an oil industry in California on any scale similar to Texas.

Does Texas seem to collect less tax than California? By their own numbers, yes. But the thing is, the differences in the amount of money pulled in via taxes aren't as big as your income numbers suggest. Texas is instead skewed towards consumption taxes for individuals which as I've pointed out, are regressive taxes. Those higher up the income ladders pay less of it as a percentage of their income. It's just not something that can be compared directly by looking at raw tax rates. A progressive income tax will also tend to pull in a bit more revenue when you have wealthy citizens than sales taxes. To get that "13%" you talk about, that household has to be pulling in more than 1.3m a year. I certainly ain't anywhere near that. Anyone making less than 100,000$ a year in California is paying a lower tax rate than the state sales tax in Texas...

If I lived in California with my current pay, my effective income tax rate would still be lower than Texas' sales tax rate (and WA for that matter), although that's still not a 1:1 comparison because again, sales tax is a consumption tax. I don't spend 100% of my income, so you need to see how much gets spent to see what the effective tax rate under a sales tax regime. Those that spend more of their income per month will be closer to the stated rate.

EDIT: I think it's also interesting to point out the per capita tax revenue per state:
Texas: 2.93b per million people
California: 2.38b per million people

So per capita, California is pulling in less in taxes? Not more? As I'm hopefully demonstrating, it's not so simple.
 
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Herdfan said:
Others are looking for, in some cases, the exact opposite.
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If by the exact opposite you mean some people are attracted to states where abortion is banned, transgender care is highly regulated by government, and book banning is encouraged, I suppose that's so. But the majority of Americans are against complete or near-complete abortion bans — the issue particularly hits home if a close family member is of reproductive age. I don't know the stats on attitudes toward transgender care policies or book banning, but the latter is a stark example of a slippery slope.
 
People who want book banning don't really agree with it either, as someone here pointed out to us in the case of Bill O'Reilly, who supported Florida's book ban and now has beef with the state when one of his propaganda pamphlets ended up on the burn pile.

Those people like fascists. They like being told what to do, they like having a ruler, and nothing makes a slave feel more free than telling another slave what to do in furtherance of the master. It's all fine and well when they stop the drag queen from showing up to a library or they get a book taken off the shelf, but then when the cops come knocking because big brother found out they were using a VPN to access Pornhub, sad is the song and they start crying about being oppressed, blissfully ignorant of how their mad rush to persecute someone different than them really ended up sealing their own fate.

It starts with burning books and ends up with Trump as the "eternal president" and his kids taking over in succession. F*** that.
 
Listened to a report by author Jared Yates Sexton who went to the Iowa caucuses. He leans left but his books are about decades or centuries of power structures and how they exploit the masses to prop up the wealthy and powerful. He started going to Trump rallies back in 2016 initially out of curiosity and just wanting to get out of the house. Coming from an Evangelical upbringing he saw the red flags almost immediately from the language Trump was using to how the crowd was responding.

Back when he started going to rallies people were just kind of feeling each other out and almost shocked they could openly say the things you don’t say in mixed company. At this last rally he said all that pretense is gone. The crowd is aggressive, misogynistic, bigoted and openly fantasizing about violence and civil war. “They don’t care about policy. They want to crush the people they hate into dust and laugh while doing it.”

Policy. I’m sure there was no shortage of people in 1930s Germany who didn’t go to rallies and said some derivative of “I wish he wouldn’t say those mean things but I like his policies.”
 
rdrr said:
Why lie?

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Trump is starting to call her "Nimrada", to make fun of her birth name, Nimarata Nikki Randhawa.

Which she'd have no problem with the rest of us calling her that - and intentionally adding a bunch of goofy inflection to her name like Trump did with "KAH-MAH-LAH!".

Perfectly normal, acceptable, American, patriotic behavior.
 
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Alli said:
Hailey has been passing for white for so long she’s beginning to believe her own lies.
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I think she knows she's lying, just as she did when she didn't say the Civil War was fought about slavery. But just like so many other cowardly Republicans, she values her aspirations over everything. For awhile, I believed Haley had a chance to give Trump a bit of a run, though I strongly doubted she could ever replace him as front-runner. Now, barring some drastic event, she has no political future. Still, I expect her to endorse Trump when the time comes.
 
Chew Toy McCoy said:
Listened to a report by author Jared Yates Sexton who went to the Iowa caucuses. He leans left but his books are about decades or centuries of power structures and how they exploit the masses to prop up the wealthy and powerful. He started going to Trump rallies back in 2016 initially out of curiosity and just wanting to get out of the house. Coming from an Evangelical upbringing he saw the red flags almost immediately from the language Trump was using to how the crowd was responding.

Back when he started going to rallies people were just kind of feeling each other out and almost shocked they could openly say the things you don’t say in mixed company. At this last rally he said all that pretense is gone. The crowd is aggressive, misogynistic, bigoted and openly fantasizing about violence and civil war. “They don’t care about policy. They want to crush the people they hate into dust and laugh while doing it.”

Policy. I’m sure there was no shortage of people in 1930s Germany who didn’t go to rallies and said some derivative of “I wish he wouldn’t say those mean things but I like his policies.”
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Validating everything I suspected about MAGA rally goers.

They have zero decency, humanity, or caring for others. They are just bullies with a brash, loudmouth, demigod.
 
rdrr said:
Validating everything I suspected about MAGA rally goers.

They have zero decency, humanity, or caring for others. They are just bullies with a brash, loudmouth, demigod.
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Trump shares their values but he’s also a massive feedback loop who riffs endlessly on whatever the crowd reacts to the most which is misogyny, bigotry, and violence under the guise of patriotism. Everything else puts them to sleep.

Watched a video defining fascism which the creator felt is being thrown around way too loosely. Among its characteristics is it’s the only political ideology driven almost entirely on negativity. Everything is going to hell. People are coming for you. People are taking away or receiving things that rightly belong to you. Sounds like today’s Republican party to me.
 
Can’t make this stuff up.

Nikki Haley: “America is not a racist country”

Donald Trump: “Can we talk about Nimarata ‘Nikki’ Randhawa, folks?”
 
Eric said:
Can’t make this stuff up.

Nikki Haley: “America is not a racist country”

Donald Trump: “Can we talk about Nimarata ‘Nikki’ Randhawa, folks?”
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If Haley is an example of what the South’s education system pumps out then no wonder they’re upset to find out slavery was probably bad.

“In the 1600s Africans started arriving by boat. Shortly after they pioneered Hip Hop and worked on the plantations as a side hustle.”
 
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