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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
- Thread starter lpetrich
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Harry Bosch
Contributor
Well, this seems to be a derail. I think that she's more talking about increasing the regulations on banks and taxing the stock transactions. I like her and think that it's good that we have straight shooting liberal in congress that Fox news hates. I like some of her positions. But I'll probably disagree with some others. But that's okay. We don't have to agree to everything.
Harry Bosch
Contributor
I agree that Glass Steagall should be reinstated. I'd prefer that larger banks who were deemed to be too large to fail would just be regulated more. As a business owner, I hate the large banks. But larger banks are needed to help the very large US corporations. If they were to go away, the larger US corporations would just move their business to large foreign banks.
I'm not sure what is gained by making the post office a deposit gathering business. The costs for consumers for bank deposits are incredible low today. And most banks are paying for deposits. The post office would not pay for deposits as they have no business needs for deposits. Unless you are arguing that they should also be making loans? If so, I'm not sure that I'd trust mail men to make business loans.
RavenSky
The Doctor's Wife
same here
I agree with you here
The idea is to provide accessibility to people in rural and poorer areas.
Post Office Banking: An Old Idea Getting New Life
https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/post-office-banking-2/
The ironic part about so many of her ideas is that they aren't new. They are what the red hats SHOULD be referencing when they say MAGA
Harry Bosch
Contributor
I like your term: red hats! Based on the above, using the post office for rural people makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of services that a modern bank/credit union offers for depositers that a post office wouldn't be able to replicate. But clearly Cortez isn't the radical that the red hats are making her out to be.
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Jimmy Higgins
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I agree fully. In college I did nothing but classes and work. Not a second of fun. I was also a coal miner and worked the assembly line and served in the military.
Which is why I'm calling it crackpot. That's way too much economic disruption for an unattainable goal.
That needs details.
Again, details.
Bad idea. A lot of people aren't college material. What we should do is undo the cuts to college funding the government has been making for many years now, put State U and the community colleges back to affordable.
I'd either legalize or make available by prescription to addicts basically all recreational drugs.
Crackpot territory.
Huh?
1) The numbers don't work the way it's proponents say.
2) It's putting the fox in charge of the henhouse and will result in erosion of quality.
Nice statement, generally not meaningful.
Living wage is another one of these leftist delusions.
Horrible idea. Puerto Rico got itself in trouble by the bread-and-circuses route. We shouldn't be bailing that out.
Besides, it's not the government that owns that debt, if you cancel it you're hurting an awful lot of people that own said debt.
For profit prisons I agree.
ICE does need to do some detention. What needs to end is the current punitive system.
Thus showing you're too far left to be trying to direct a country.
You have no retirement savings of any sort, including pension and 401k?
Huh? The poor are basically unaffected by the stock market. (Note, however, that the stock market is a reflection of the economy--when the economy is bad the poor suffer and the stock market suffers.)
As for SSN--I don't understand the N but it's obvious he's referring to Social Security.
Some from both sides have had a delusion of obtaining vast sums by taxing stock trades. In reality they would kill high frequency trading (which would probably be a good thing) and kill arbitrage trading (a bad thing, arbitrage traders provide a useful benefit to keeping the various markets in balance) and raise nothing like the money they envision.
As for taxing capital gains as ordinary income--I favor this provided we tax the true gain, not the phantom gain of inflation. Note that in the big picture this is approximately neutral--given average stock market returns capital gains rate + the tax on phantom income is pretty close to the regular income tax rate. This will never be done, though, because it would take a huge bite out of the tax paid on interest income. (An awful lot of the interest is just making up for inflation.)
The numbers they use do make it a bit less than the current cost of insurance. The problem is that this is ignoring the fact that very often Medicare costs are subsidized from private insurance.
They're using the stick your head in the sand approach to these aspects of the problem.
I believe the intent is to provide banking services with no minimum balance requirements and no monthly fees.
I think it would be better handled by requiring all banks to offer a no-frills free checking account. (Provide a list of what they must provide, although a bank which completely does not provide a service isn't obligated to provide it on a free account.)
Note, however, that this will not do nearly as much for the unbanked as leftists imagine. An awful lot of the unbanked are either fleeing judgments or have stiffed the banks and so the banks don't want to deal with them.
marc
Veteran Member
Funny that the GOP fearmongers about the high tax rate, when it was higher in the ‘good old days’ they want to go back to..... or was it something else about those times that they miss?
Or some are referring to the guilded age as the good old days
southernhybrid
Contributor
Funny that the GOP fearmongers about the high tax rate, when it was higher in the ‘good old days’ they want to go back to..... or was it something else about those times that they miss?
Or some are referring to the guilded age as the good old days
It's true that the highest rate was about 91%, but from what I've read, nobody paid that rate due to deductions etc. After deductions, the highest rate was about 50%, still much higher than today. But, even AOC has said that the 70% rate would only apply to those making over 10 million per year and that would be before deductions. It's an interesting thing to discuss, even though it's unrealistic to expect it will ever be passed into law.
Everybody remembers what they want to about the "good ole days".
Harry Bosch
Contributor
Funny that the GOP fearmongers about the high tax rate, when it was higher in the ‘good old days’ they want to go back to..... or was it something else about those times that they miss?
Or some are referring to the guilded age as the good old days
It's true that the highest rate was about 91%, but from what I've read, nobody paid that rate due to deductions etc. After deductions, the highest rate was about 50%, still much higher than today. But, even AOC has said that the 70% rate would only apply to those making over 10 million per year and that would be before deductions. It's an interesting thing to discuss, even though it's unrealistic to expect it will ever be passed into law.
Everybody remembers what they want to about the "good ole days".
Very true that people have very selective memory when it comes to the good ole days! I think that it would be better to eliminate all deductions and then implement a more politically acceptable tax rate that would be accepted by a majority. Fox news is very good at twisting the truth.
PyramidHead
Contributor
It's funny to me how the fact that rich people will find ways to avoid paying taxes is used as an argument for why we shouldn't tax them. Like, okay, we gave it our best shot and it turns out it'll never work because of loopholes, onto the next idea. But when someone sees a welfare recipient buying a bag of Doritos it's suddenly "maybe we should invent microchips that go into the Doritos and prevent them from being ingested by poor people"
southernhybrid
Contributor
I don't do either of those things, but I have known middle class people that resented poor people who received public assistance. I've never understood that. Maybe they are people with miserable lives who resent anyone getting something that they don't get. A lot of it is due to ignorance. Most people that I talk to don't even know the first thing about the TANF program, or that most people who receive SNAP benefits are either disabled, older adults or the working poor.
I've never known of anyone who claimed that we shouldn't tax the wealthy because of loopholes, so I have no idea where you got that idea from. The argument is usually a selfish one. It goes something like this. It's my money. I earned it. I shouldn't have to help anyone else. At the same time they fail to admit that they benefit from the laws, opportunities and infrastructure that allowed them to succeed. They fail to understand that not everyone has the same potential to become financially successful, etc. I am friends with a lot of poor people and I know their struggles. I also know that they never had the type of opportunities that most wealthy people have had. We are often taught that we can do or be anything that we want in the US, which is a delusion, since people have very different potential in addition to different levels of opportunity. But, I'm sure the posters here know that already.
I don't like extreme wealth inequality, but I think it will take some time and careful consideration to figure out the best way to reduce the horrendous inequality that we currently have.
I haven't itemized deductions since we paid off our mortgage many years ago, and we live in a low tax state. But, I know that the liberals in high tax states, like my sister in NJ, are extremely upset because they can no longer deduct the full amount of their real estate taxes. etc. The vast majority of these people aren't wealthy. My sister is middle class with a decent income, but she lives in a very expensive state. Getting rid of all deductions sounds great, but it would be very hard to accomplish. And, people who live in very expensive states like NJ and California would probably be hurt the most. Change never comes easy, does it?
I am not against change but plans and ideas must be well thought out, detailed and realistic. Sometimes we tend to forget that our country is made up of people with very different ideas, views and beliefs, from our own. Nobody gets to have it all their way. There has to be some compromise that is acceptable to the majority of the people.
Funny that the GOP fearmongers about the high tax rate, when it was higher in the ‘good old days’ they want to go back to..... or was it something else about those times that they miss?
Or some are referring to the guilded age as the good old days
Back then there were so many loopholes it looked like Swiss cheese. Most people didn't actually pay those high rates. (But we will never know the true data as most of the issue was dodges that kept it from being reported as income in the first place, thus there's nothing in the IRS records to use to figure it out.)
No. What we are saying is that the "it worked before" argument is wrong because people didn't actually pay those rates.