It's easy to try and re-write the rules of an economy after you have already built a business that takes advantage of an economy that you did not build.

This aint SimCity we are talking about here. Macro is hard. Being rich doesn't make you a good economist.

The best way to have a happy life when you are still poor is not to compare yourself to your richer neighbors, but to work hard, save, invest in yourself, stay married, and stay out of jail.

The best way to live a happy life when you are not poor is not to compare your tax bill to your yard guy's tax bill as he tries to work hard, save, invest in himself, and stay out of jail.

You live in the best economy that has ever existed, and it was not built on the rules that you are advocating for.

I don't think anyone argues that we have gotten off track, but there is no data that says that you are going to be better off in an economy with a flat tax than a moderately progressive income tax that encourages people without resources to preserve capital, innovate, build businesses, and grow the GDP. There is no assurance that such an economy would exist in a flat tax environment. To say that it is all simple 8th grade math, and draw red and blue line graphs, say everything is obvious, and insinuate that this is the way the world really works is just naive.

Democrats are still continuing to run on saving America from Trump. A liberal female acquaintance from my church shared this Vote Save America tweet on Instagram:

The U.S. government should not be run like The Apprentice. pic.twitter.com/66V7kabBow

— Vote Save America (@votesaveamerica) February 18, 2025

I think she's dumb.

Tom Fox said:

---

BusterAg said:

---

Good lawyers make bad economists. Guys like you hire guys like me to teach them and their audience about economics.

I am smart enough not to get into a legal argument with BMX or Hawg. I did that once on a bourbon bender, and it did not go well.

Congrats on your successful business. I wish you nothing more than future success.

---

If you were sincere, thank you. I agree that I am not an economist. Not even close. I just want to get rich and leave some for my girls. The feds taking a quarter mil annually makes that tougher.

Cheers.

---

Zero hard feelings. TexAgs sharpens my irons. It makes me better at my job.

And I really am an economist / finance professional that caters to lawyers. It's just I work in a very small industry, and I have seen others on this site get doxxed.

A flat tax is not likely the best answer to lower taxes. Reducing fraud at the federal government and the size of the federal government is, IMO.

BusterAg said:

---

It's easy to try and re-write the rules of an economy after you have already built a business that takes advantage of an economy that you did not build.

---

Sounds like Obama... "you didn't build that"

Typical socialist outlook on life... stopped reading beyond that.

We'll keep pushing for fair tax policy. When 47% of income earners don't pay income tax on a net basis, we aren't even in the universe of "fair."

A flat tax applied broadly with no deductions better aligns with the American way of doing things. Progressivism is a socialist, European-centric way of approaching the world which "feels" better to the majority but falls far behind in innovation and financial performance. The track record proves it.

BusterAg said:

---

Good lawyers make bad economists. Guys like you hire guys like me to teach them and their audience about economics.

I am smart enough not to get into a legal argument with BMX or Hawg. I did that once on a bourbon bender, and it did not go well.

Congrats on your successful business. I wish you nothing more than future success.

---

If you're teaching economics, we're screwed. Your road analogy is economically illiterate.

RGLAG85 said:

---

BusterAg said:

---

Good lawyers make bad economists. Guys like you hire guys like me to teach them and their audience about economics.

I am smart enough not to get into a legal argument with BMX or Hawg. I did that once on a bourbon bender, and it did not go well.

Congrats on your successful business. I wish you nothing more than future success.

---

If you're teaching economics, we're screwed. Your road analogy is economically illiterate.

---

Thanks for your comment.

The analogy is simplified. All analogies are imperfect. It ignores the socio-political aspect. Most red-pen blue-pen economic theory does.

To make it more concrete, Elon Musk didn't need a huge subsidy to build his gigaplant. Who do you think benefited more from that tax cut? Elon Musk and all the major shareholders of Tesla, or the gigaplant workers?

On a conceptual level, infrastructure spending often times helps poorer people more than richer people.
However, the people with the money generally decide where government money is spent. As can be seen in this thread, they are usually not that concerned with overall economic growth or poor people.

If all our tax dollars were really spent with the sole goal to help grow the economy, as opposed to make rich people richer, we wouldn't have stupid things like city taxes paying for professional sports stadiums.

You might say that is the government picking winners and losers. Guess what, the winners that the government picks are always the people with money, pretty indiscriminately over any reasonable timeline.
To pretend that we can weed out this type of behavior from government is just as naive as thinking that most infrastructure investment $ for $ helps the poor more than the rich in reality. Plenty of research that It doesn't. It benefits the people directing where the money is spent more.

The mess that we are in now is that this reality is almost 100% pure. The money is getting directed, not into projects that benefit the rich more than the poor, but directly into the pockets of the rich under make-believe projects. It's just a purified form of a game that is as old as the republic itself.

The way to reduce taxes is to reduce the size of the federal government, making the pool of money smaller, and push as much spending power down to the local level as possible, reducing the concentration of the pools of money. If the pools of money are smaller, it makes it more difficult for the people with the money to control the purse. The ROI of investing in any one government official shrinks exponentially with the size of the pool of money that official can influence.

Max taxation and spend is just wealth redistribution. For economic growth, we need more innovators, entrepreneurs, risk takers, savers and hard workers. That is where wealth is created, not redistributed. Implementing a flat tax helps those issues none, helps the real problem of the rich directing spending absolutely none, and is not the optimum economic growth strategy. It just makes the people that direct where the government money flows pay even less in taxes, while growing the pool of money available to direct.

In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to worry about any of that, because we would have perfectly benevolent beaurocrats and elected officials who have the welfare of the entire nation as their top priority. Such a man does not exist.

What of the above, specifically, do you disagree with?

BusterAg said:

---

Senator Klobuchar says that they are trying to work with the GOP on a budget, and they are "unwilling to stand up to Trump" to keep the government moving.

The GOP can pass a budget through reconciliation that guts a lot of the stupid spending. But, I don't think that they will.

I think it will be very important to pass tax cuts that are as targeted as Klobuchar wants. Focus tax cuts on people "making less than $400k a year".

I know Trump wants to lower the capital gains tax rate, but maybe that needs to wait until after mid-terms. Maybe put in a significant deduction for capital gains tax of $250k per year. This would allow early investors of Crypto start to cash out tax free, and help people that have a home they want to sell to move.

If Trump can get the economy back on track and shrink the budget deficit by A LOT, then MAGA will kill it in the mid terms, and he can use the latter part of his presidency to pass the larger tax cuts. I would rather Trump use the political capital right now to gut spending, not on tax cuts. If he guts spending, and we have a plan to get to a balanced budget by 2032, and we stick to that plan, MAGA will continue to have lots of power.

---

No! Nothing can wait. The republicans will **** up in the midterms and lose the house. Then Trump's doa. Nothing will get done and he will be impeached. The swamp will win. Again.

valvemonkey91 said:

---

BusterAg said:

---

Senator Klobuchar says that they are trying to work with the GOP on a budget, and they are "unwilling to stand up to Trump" to keep the government moving.

The GOP can pass a budget through reconciliation that guts a lot of the stupid spending. But, I don't think that they will.

I think it will be very important to pass tax cuts that are as targeted as Klobuchar wants. Focus tax cuts on people "making less than $400k a year".

I know Trump wants to lower the capital gains tax rate, but maybe that needs to wait until after mid-terms. Maybe put in a significant deduction for capital gains tax of $250k per year. This would allow early investors of Crypto start to cash out tax free, and help people that have a home they want to sell to move.

If Trump can get the economy back on track and shrink the budget deficit by A LOT, then MAGA will kill it in the mid terms, and he can use the latter part of his presidency to pass the larger tax cuts. I would rather Trump use the political capital right now to gut spending, not on tax cuts. If he guts spending, and we have a plan to get to a balanced budget by 2032, and we stick to that plan, MAGA will continue to have lots of power.

---

No! Nothing can wait. The republicans will **** up in the midterms and lose the house. Then Trump's doa. Nothing will get done and he will be impeached. The swamp will win. Again.

---

The republicans are not in charge anymore. MAGA is leading the charge.

And, they actually do stuff. Like, fire useless employees and reduce fraud and reduce waste and punch MSM hosts in the mouth.

And, coming summer of 2026, plenty of perp walks.

BusterAg said:

---

valvemonkey91 said:

---

BusterAg said:

---

Senator Klobuchar says that they are trying to work with the GOP on a budget, and they are "unwilling to stand up to Trump" to keep the government moving.

The GOP can pass a budget through reconciliation that guts a lot of the stupid spending. But, I don't think that they will.

I think it will be very important to pass tax cuts that are as targeted as Klobuchar wants. Focus tax cuts on people "making less than $400k a year".

I know Trump wants to lower the capital gains tax rate, but maybe that needs to wait until after mid-terms. Maybe put in a significant deduction for capital gains tax of $250k per year. This would allow early investors of Crypto start to cash out tax free, and help people that have a home they want to sell to move.

If Trump can get the economy back on track and shrink the budget deficit by A LOT, then MAGA will kill it in the mid terms, and he can use the latter part of his presidency to pass the larger tax cuts. I would rather Trump use the political capital right now to gut spending, not on tax cuts. If he guts spending, and we have a plan to get to a balanced budget by 2032, and we stick to that plan, MAGA will continue to have lots of power.

---

No! Nothing can wait. The republicans will **** up in the midterms and lose the house. Then Trump's doa. Nothing will get done and he will be impeached. The swamp will win. Again.

---

The republicans are not in charge anymore. MAGA is leading the charge.

And, they actually do stuff. Like, fire useless employees and reduce fraud and reduce waste and punch MSM hosts in the mouth.

And, coming summer of 2026, plenty of perp walks.

---

How do you know they were useless? There wasn't any work done to discern this? There literally wasn't enough time. Shotgun firing a random assortment of employees without a process in place, with no data to back the firings, isn't reducing useless employees, it's incompetence.


(though, not really incompetence considering waste isn't their actual goal here...)

ETFan said:

---

BusterAg said:

---

valvemonkey91 said:

---

BusterAg said:

---

Senator Klobuchar says that they are trying to work with the GOP on a budget, and they are "unwilling to stand up to Trump" to keep the government moving.

The GOP can pass a budget through reconciliation that guts a lot of the stupid spending. But, I don't think that they will.

I think it will be very important to pass tax cuts that are as targeted as Klobuchar wants. Focus tax cuts on people "making less than $400k a year".

I know Trump wants to lower the capital gains tax rate, but maybe that needs to wait until after mid-terms. Maybe put in a significant deduction for capital gains tax of $250k per year. This would allow early investors of Crypto start to cash out tax free, and help people that have a home they want to sell to move.

If Trump can get the economy back on track and shrink the budget deficit by A LOT, then MAGA will kill it in the mid terms, and he can use the latter part of his presidency to pass the larger tax cuts. I would rather Trump use the political capital right now to gut spending, not on tax cuts. If he guts spending, and we have a plan to get to a balanced budget by 2032, and we stick to that plan, MAGA will continue to have lots of power.

---

No! Nothing can wait. The republicans will **** up in the midterms and lose the house. Then Trump's doa. Nothing will get done and he will be impeached. The swamp will win. Again.

---

The republicans are not in charge anymore. MAGA is leading the charge.

And, they actually do stuff. Like, fire useless employees and reduce fraud and reduce waste and punch MSM hosts in the mouth.

And, coming summer of 2026, plenty of perp walks.

---

How do you know they were useless? There wasn't any work done to discern this? There literally wasn't enough time. Shotgun firing a random assortment of employees without a process in place, with no data to back the firings, isn't reducing useless employees, it's incompetence.


(though, not really incompetence considering waste isn't their actual goal here...)

---

Is it your position that zero of the "workers" at USAID were useless? Or the US Attorneys appointed by Biden? None of those were useless? If no, then he has fired useless workers.

And, if Trump fires someone, and it turns out they were actually useful, he can always hire them back. He's giving them plenty of severance time for him to make up his mind.

I'm not even going to address your vacant mush-mouth baseless comment in parentheses.

Here's the MSM strategy - blame everything on Trump.