Kamala Harris Wants To Give to Give Middle Class Families $500 Every Month

[Straight Shooter]

Senator kamala harris, a California Democrat and potential 2020 presidential contender, has a Trump-size tax plan of her own.

Harris is offering a kind of fun-house-mirror inversion of the sweeping Republican tax initiative, one that would, instead of slashing rates on high-income households and corporations, push huge credits out to middle-income and poor families. The lift the Middle Class Act would provide monthly cash payments of up to $500 to lower-income families, on top of the tax credits and public benefits they already receive. “Last year, Congress gave a trillion dollars in tax breaks to corporations,” Harris told me. “That money should have gone to American taxpayers who need it instead of handing it over to corporations and the top 1 percent.”

Her proposal joins a growing number of aggressive plans coming from Democrats concerned with economic stagnation, competing to win over younger and more progressive voters, and emboldened by the success of President Donald Trump. They differ in their mechanisms, costs, and effects, but all point to the same Robin Hood goal: not just raising taxes on the rich, but shunting vastly more money to the working classes and the poor. In Harris’s case, that means something like $200 billion a year more.

There is a good economic case for such a shift, Democrats argue. Families in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution are earning just $133 more a month today than they were a decade ago. (For families in the top 5 percent, the figure is $7,548.) The middle class has gotten smaller and the poverty rate has not budged, while the the cost of health care, housing, child care, and education have all increased, in some places sharply. “This is an immodest proposal,” said Sarah Rosen Wartell, the president of the Urban Institute. “But we’re facing some big structural changes in the economy.”

There is a good political case, too, the theory goes. The Trump tax cuts, which were heavily tilted toward corporations and the richest-of-the-rich families, remain deeply unpopular among the voting public—indeed, they are less popular than the tax increases passed by Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, with most Americans saying the tax law did nothing to help them. Plus, despite all of the partisan fighting over Brett Kavanaugh’s behavior, Elizabeth Warren’s heritage, and Trump’s constant stream of misinformation, voters remain primarily focused on health care, immigration, and jobs. The idea is to offer them something radical and tangible.

Harris is offering as much as $3,000 a year for a single person or $6,000 a year for a married couple, on top of existing tax and transfer programs, disbursed either as a lump-sum tax refund or as a monthly payment. Working families making less than $100,000 a year would qualify, including those making close to nothing. As many as 80 million Americans would benefit, Harris’s office has estimated, with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculating that the proposal would lift 9 million people out of poverty, including nearly 3 million kids.

It is big, in other words, as are the other cash initiatives coming from the left. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Representative Ro Khanna of California have put forward an ambitious tax plan that would double the earned income-tax credit (EITC) many families receive and make 20 million more Americans eligible for the benefit. Roughly 50 million Americans would get more money from Uncle Sam. “Americans are working longer hours, but too many aren’t seeing that hard work reflected in their pay,” Brown said, introducing the proposal. And Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey has proposed extending the EITC to millions of family caregivers and students.

If it looks like class warfare, that is because, in some sense, it is—making the government more redistributive than it is now, and more redistributive than it was during the Barack Obama years. An analysis of Harris’s proposal by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy finds it to be roughly the same size as the Trump tax cuts. But the average family in the bottom income quintile will see $100 in benefits from Trump’s tax initiative as of 2019, with the average family in the middle getting $800 in benefits and $55,190 for those in in the top 1 percent. In contrast, Harris’s legislation would have families in the bottom and middle of the income distribution benefit by $2,000 on average, with no effect on those at the top.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/lefts-trump-sized-tax-plans/573328/

Good start. It's about as close as we can get to UBI. But Harris still won't have my vote. As a general rule I don't vote for prosecutors

#StraightShooter

 

[Ace Boobtoucher]

Bullshit. No handouts. That's not what this country is about. Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome. Some people are destined to be fry cooks, waiters, cleaning ladies, janitors or bus drivers. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's dignity in any job, but having a guaranteed income will not breed prosperity or self worth. It will breed laziness, inefficiency, generational dependency and skyrocketing debt. And where is this cure all going to come from? Where is the funding? Anything remotely resembling this shitty idea would be rightly shouted down, ridiculed and if by some miracle was passed by a duplicitous congress, would be shelved or vetoed faster than you could imagine.

That's what's either truly hilarious or deeply frightening about leftist ideology. Their ideas are so far out of whack that even the idea of entertaining them leads to insanity.

 

[georges]

Bullshit. No handouts. That's not what this country is about. Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome. Some people are destined to be fry cooks, waiters, cleaning ladies, janitors or bus drivers. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's dignity in any job, but having a guaranteed income will not breed prosperity or self worth. It will breed laziness, inefficiency, generational dependency and skyrocketing debt. And where is this cure all going to come from? Where is the funding? Anything remotely resembling this shitty idea would be rightly shouted down, ridiculed and if by some miracle was passed by a duplicitous congress, would be shelved or vetoed faster than you could imagine.

That's what's either truly hilarious or deeply frightening about leftist ideology. Their ideas are so far out of whack that even the idea of entertaining them leads to insanity.

You have forgotten that our friend Straghtshooter said that in this thread https://board.freeones.com/showthre...migrant-caravan-quot-heading-to-the-US-border

I hope all 5,000 migrants make it into the U.S. Because soon those will be 5,000 Democratic voters. It's about damn time the Democratic Party got their act together in getting well organized and well funded. Big tip of the cap for George Soros who has been crucial on the financial side in terms of getting the funds to these migrants so that they can get here. Well done Democrats. I didn't think you had it in you

Apparently he likes more illegals, criminals, health care leech offs and socialism rather than he likes vets, meritocracy and people who work hard as well as who value their anthem, their flag, their constitution, their 2nd amendment and their borders

 

[~~whimsy~~]

Fuck that. I see places hiring all the time and nobody wants to work. Places from minimum wage to 500 dollars a week paychecks. Fuck these leeches.

And fuck those migrants. I hope they get carpet bombed and napalmed.