
The notion that the Trumptards who supported and still support the Red Queen think he is some populist godhead leader is beyond the pale. Last year, he teamed up with his kleptocratic allies to deliver a tax plan that was hyper pro-oligarch and nasty in extremis.
To review, that plan slashed taxes for the top 1% of taxpayers. Heads of uber-wealthy households raking in more than $440,000 a year saw their rate reduced to from 39.6% to 35%. Repeal of the alternative minimum tax saves even more for the 1%. Those in the upper-income bracket of $213,000 to $417,000 per year get a rate reduction from 33% of earning to 25%. Yet, the 25% tax-rate bracket remains the same for America’s core lower-middle to upper-middle income households earning $50,801 to $131,200 a year.
Estate taxes are eliminated altogether. This benefits those inheriting more than $5.45 million. The blue line in the 2015 wealth distribution chart is going parabolic. Important distinction: This is actually the top 0.1%, not the 1%.
The corporate tax rate and the pass-through business tax was cut to 15%. The current rate structure produces a flat 34% tax rate on businesses earning from $335,000 to $10 million, gradually increasing to a flat rate of 35% on earnings above $18.3 million. The cost of this move is $3.7 trillion over 10 years. According to the Treasury, 43% of corporate tax is paid for by the top 1%.
Add the territorial system with a one-time tax on overseas profits. This is repatriation of profits parked overseas. This neo-liberal scheme is being used for stock-price manipulation and buybacks, not capital investment and so-called re-industrialization.
Now we have a new Trumpenstein proposal to “help” his kleptocrat sidekicks: a $100-billion unilateral tax bypassing Congress with “a legally tenuous maneuver that would cut capital gains taxation.” This is a one-time inflation-adjusted long-term cost basis when calculating capital gains tax.

This new kleptocrat tax proposal came 24 hours after the UST said it expects to borrow $56 billion more during the third quarter than previously estimated. This means $329 billion in net marketable debt will be issued from July through September. UST also forecasts $440 billion of net borrowing in the final three months of 2018. This does not include existing debt that needs to be rolled over on maturity by holders such as China.
Keep in mind that the Fed is reducing its balance sheet by $120 billion during this July-September period. This goes to $150 billion from October-December. Little wonder Red Queen is starting to pressure, hammer and set up his scapegoat, Fed chief mucky muck Jerome Powell, for his puny and token interest-rate increases.

Overnight, Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration is set to increase a proposed 10% tariff on $200 billion in Chinese imports to 25%. If enacted, it would mean overall tariffs of $505 billion on Chinese imports.
Does this dry-fuel soaked kindling and confluence of lunacy set the table for a fat-finger sell order from this particular U.S. Treasury holder? Russia, with a smaller stash, has already cleared out of Dodge.
Sorry Russ. First in a LONG time I’m not in agreement with you:
….Heads of uber wealthy households raking in more than $440,000 a year saw their rate reduced to from 39.6% to 35%. ..
Those of us who run closely held Sub-S family companies are not “uber wealthy”. Many of us pull minimal salaries and allow most of our profits to flow back into our companies to fund growth, reduce debt and create a future pathway of success for our employees and children. Getting that cash flow cut in half and sent off to fund the deep state is a quarterly bitter pill. Allowing it to flow back as other than ‘earned income’ is equitable .. we earned it in the first place. Who better to reinvest it for the future, we or the US government?
… his kleptocrat sidekicks. A $100 billion unilateral tax bypassing Congress with “a legally tenuous maneuver that would cut capital gains taxation …
How is it equitable to buy an asset, hold on to it, sell it years later, pay taxes on the entire gain BUT get your asset back in depreciated dollars? That is double taxation, is it not? – one by the IRS the other by the Fed.
… estate taxes are eliminated altogether. This benefits those inheriting more than $5.45 million. The blue line in the 2015 wealth distribution chart is going parabolic. Important distinction: This is the top 0.1%, not the 1%. …
Many of us have built businesses which we intend to pass on to future generations. In most cases this is there entirety of our ‘estate’. How is it useful to be forced to sell that business simply to cover estate taxes? We spend our entire lives building something, paying taxes, employing people, taking the risks, investing significant chunks of our limited time here on earth as a benefit to future generations, yet you believe it is equitable for the government to walk in to “get their taste”?
The problem is not taxes. We have a spending problem.
One last side note. Drop the “Trumptard” meme. It’s beneath you.
$769 billion in net new borrowing through this quarter and next- and propose another cap gain cut? Tard- barely does this justice. System collapses and burns this year.
So let it burn. Why continue to maintain the political status quo on the backs of the 99% we the middle class? We are not of any importance to the uber wealthy beyond our ability to hold this together until they can pick and choose a time to bring it down. Never allow your opponent to pick his moment to move to the offense.
What do we have as it is? Taxes are simply an endowment to the globalists to create more mayhem ending only with our own enslavement; you opened my eyes to that. It’s not as if Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama ever intended to pay it all back and Trump is now being reckless. From day one this was about stealing from the future to achieve the globalist’s one world goal and crash it. Mathematically it’s a fait accompli, so why not let it drop on our terms and not that of the elite?
Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted. ~ Sun Tsu
I totally hear what you’re saying — but here’s another little fact. My self-employment tax rate last year was 23% — and my income was below the poverty line. Small businesses — which are the creators of most of the jobs in the country — didn’t get a tax break. But Goldman cronies with their obscene salaries got one. And if you chose to invest your retirement nest egg in real estate rather than Wall Street, your taxes increased last year. Somebody needs to explain to me how all this is fair taxation. I believe everyone should pay some taxes. It’s called “skin in the game.” But I’m getting stretch marks at those rates. For 2018, the self-employed are supposed to get a break. We’ll see.
So am I super excited about Trump’s trickle-down tax plan for top earners? Um, no. Slashed taxes for everyone is great in principle for a country on sound economic footing, but that’s not us. Given our country’s wealth stratification, Trump’s policy makes makes zero sense economically. The reality is that the super wealthy still benefit from all those loopholes and tricks that Obama promised to do away with and never did. Remember the whole “flat tax, no loopholes” rhetoric? Whatever happened to that?
How much has really been cut in spending and where? Shouldn’t we cut spending before giving handouts to golf buddies?
Bottom line is that national debt matters. Default matters. The ramifications of default would be grotesque for generations. Tax dollars are needed for defense, infrastructure, maturities on retirement accounts — and even for that border wall. The only walls I seeing being built so far are around the compounds of the hyper-elite.
You and I can certainly disagree over the implications of a system crash. Any such discussion is relegated to that of an academic one as it can only be predicted, played out and later written about in history books.
I do think we are in agreement on that the fact the ‘producing class’ (small business owners, middle management and skilled labor class) are the fatted sheep still penned in for a sheering. To paraphrase Willy Sutton: “because that’s where the money is”. But how?
In a political system that can’t even agree on a definition of the truth and would rather fabricate lies to maintain their places at the feeding trough, I wonder if our system is like a former car frame of mine, totaled in an accident, “bent beyond returning into its correct alignment”.
BTW: loved your SpongeBob article. Sent it to all my adult kids for reading.
Am a bit ‘Trumptardian’ myself, I find the man very refreshing … He legitimised ideas that The News is Fake, that you can oppose the globalists, and that you can defend your home culture without being racist; people feel he’s fighting for them re the Wall and border control
Speaking of the Wall, here’s a brilliant, funny 30-second political commercial for pro-Trump Florida governor candidate Ron Desantis, with his wife and kids, one child ‘building the wall’ with toy blocks LOL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IbT9j30TtM
Thanks for an alternative perspective. Many overlook just how a family business is taxed and small business owners are hammered. I believe Trump’s tax breaks were designed to bring business back. Unfortunately many of the big names don’t want to play along and would rather see the US go up in smoke. No loyalty, no souls.
Well, Trump’s ‘new nationalist’ that helped him get elected, Steve Bannon is now setting up shop in Brussels, Belgium, his think tank intending to be the ‘anti-globalist’ resource centre in Europe
Interesting reference to Bannon possibly already swivelling a wrecking ball into the core of the EU, in an article by French alt-media writer Thierry Meyssan of Voltairenet org. The quirky Meyssan is based in Damascus, Syria, and is said to have at times received Iranian funding.
France’s government is now shaking to its foundations over a scandal involving a bodyguard to France’s President Emmanuel Macron, said also to possibly be Macron’s gay lover. The story is very weird as to the ‘why’ of it all, and how it got to be major media. Meyssan thinks this may be the ‘nationalists’ (Trump Putin etc) taking down the ‘globalists’ (former Rothschild banker Macron)
Macron is age 41, his wife 65, the much-older wife a common gay practice. Barack Obama, also rumoured to be gay, also had a bodyguard rumoured to be Obama’s gay lover, with the apt name of Reggie Love, but Reggie was never a big story.
Macron’s age 26 Moroccan-heritage bodyguard, Alexandre Benalla, with links to Muslim extremists, was given ultra-privileges, ultra-high access, and was filmed beating up people like a thug.
Macron personally denied Benalla was his lover, or, hilariously, that Benalla had the French nuclear weapon launch codes in his possession, as a French-language satire news site had joked. Quick riffs from Meyssan’s article –
Who pushed this material about Macron’s ‘special friend’ – gay lover? – out into the major media frame?
(1) Was it perhaps a rather right-wing French Deep State of security services – who increasingly talk privately of a ‘near state of civil war’ in France, with a low-level violent insurgency from France’s now 10% Muslim population?
The ‘old guard’ of the French Deep State may think more like Marine Le Pen, and may be quite hostile to the quasi-globalism of former Rothschild banker (and possibly gay) Macron
Meyssan suggests it is possible that the French Deep State may in fact have ‘set up’ Benalla with some of his extraordinary privileges and police gear, and encouraged Benalla to act above the law and rudely beat up people … precisely in order to embarrass Macron afterwards
(2) Or was Macron himself not trusting the French government to provide his security, and so began to seek to set up a ‘private force’ utilising Alexandre Benalla? … i.e., a ‘Deep State’ against the other ‘Deep State’, as Charles De Gaulle felt he needed to do against those who tried to assassinate him? Benalla’s extremist Muslim ties, would not necessarily be negative to someone of a ‘globalist’ frame of mind, setting up ‘alternate security’ against an ‘ethno-nationalist’ French Deep State … but Macron perhaps was no match for the ethno-French ‘establishment’
(3) Or, Meyssan asks, was the info on Benalla leaked and promoted, by someone linked with what Meyssan sees as the ‘nationalist alliance’ of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin … fighting the ‘globalist Deep State’ in the USA and elsewhere … and who, as Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon has indicated he wishes to do, seek perhaps to break up the Merkel – Macron axis who are the ‘globalist-minded’ fading leadership of the EU?
What I suspect Trump’s doing is setting us up for a national debt crisis to pave the way for the privatization of everything in our country, from roads to our electric grid to a domestic national police agency, and a fire-sale selloff of our nation’s resources, such as protected lands, natural reserves, dams and bridges. Hope I’m wrong, but this is the writing I see on the border wall: Made is Israel.
Well, Israel literally helped build Viktor Orbán’s very effective wall in Hungary. Seems Netanyahu & Israel are in bed with just about every ethno-nationalist government or party in Europe.
TNN tends to praise Putin but slam Trump, but there is inconsistency in this. Putin does some great things, but also some deeply pro-Israeli Chabadnik things, like letting Israel bomb & kill Putin’s Syrian and Iranian ‘allies’ … middle-easterners despair that, in the end, the white man is zio-man, Putin using Syrians & Iranians for his east-west football but not reliable when it comes down to it
It’s notable that Israeli media & Jewish groups are consistently very soft with Putin, but at times severely attack Trump, the ADL accusing Trump of ‘anti-semitic dog whistles’, e.g., criticising the ‘globalists’ (significantly Jewish), slamming the media (significantly Jewish), as if the ADL etc are deathly afraid of something there in Trumpism … but Putin good, Trump bad?
Veterans Today had a story Putin secretly agreed that a Russian plane carrying Assad would have ‘engine trouble’, come down in a 3rd country where Assad would be arrested and brought to the Hague for ‘war crimes’, Putin of course to meekly ‘protest’ after this deal went down … VT said Assad was told to only fly Syrian or Iranian aircraft for his own well-being
Tho the Jewish groups don’t slam Putin as they do Trump for ‘anti-semitic dog whistles’, their media assets of course do keep hammering all that tripe about Russian ‘hacking & election meddling’ so that’s perhaps equivalent https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/933b58d89a83e579982c95cbaf7a6329236d57543f1dd8cd5ede6cb0ca161325.gif
Hard to see what is below that waters surface since we are not swamp creatures ourselves. We can only see who goes in and what comes out of the swamp but never what is going on down there. The Ziocon chorus is pretty loud against Trump but actions still speak louder than words. We won’t know until the shows over and the curtain is drawn up, we can only estimate from previous performances…
I focus on actual rubber meets the road acts- not perceptions, cheap talk and WWE stunts. That will be my MO going forward on about everything.
It is also clear looking at the Magnitsky and Marina Butina affairs that the usual suspects just fabricate Putin villianry.
Russ/Torchy,
check out this lady I found on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Carolyn-Emerick/e/B072KFQJQN/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1
watch her magazine description update.
Your topical book collection must be something else at this point.
Your topical book collection must be something else at this point.
To be clear, you’re right. Russ doesn’t like or trust Trump. With Putin, he’ll call out the good that is never reported, but he’s not a Putin fan — doesn’t trust him either. I don’t trust either one of ’em, but I’ll call out both the good and bad things Trump does. We have to train Trump, carrot and stick, not act like a bunch of lapdogs. I think our president is a black box — meaning there’s a lot we don’t know about him or what goes on behind the scenes. I don’t like his Israeli and neocon alliances, but he sure performs well on camera. He knows the talking points and is fun to watch at rallies.
Wouldn’t be much different than today if that is the case as our federal lands are already served up to the largest corporations, with a small donation of course, and given access. Nearly every public/private utility company is listed on the NYSE stock exchange for foreign investment possibilities. We’ve been in national debt crisis for many years, they can pull that trigger anytime they want.
On fire-sale, there is much strangeness about the forest fires ravaging CA. Ditto for the fires last year. One wonders whether there’s a Gaia agenda at work.