Current Events > Trump's Tax Cut Hasn't Done Anything for Workers

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-18/trump-s-tax-cut-hasn-t-done-anything-for-workers

Choose one:

- It's good for the workers because it will trickle down!
- I don't give a shit about the workers, it's their fault for being poor

I mean, it's one or the other. Not both.
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WHAT!? i'm shocked!
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That can't be true. I thought the billionaire real-estate mogul would give a voice to the working class.

clearly those mexican ms13 babies are stealing their jobs and thus their tax cuts!!!

WE GOTTA TAKE THEM AWAY FROM THEIR PARENTS!

OBAMA!!!!!

NO COLLUSION!!!
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That's a shitty Opinion piece with a bunch of caveats and nuances in the article and a clickbait headline to lure in the naive for click revenue.
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

That's a shitty Opinion piece with a bunch of caveats and nuances in the article and a clickbait headline to lure in the naive for click revenue.

Fake news!
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

That's a shitty Opinion piece with a bunch of caveats and nuances in the article and a clickbait headline to lure in the naive for click revenue.

No bias here, surely no need to back up this statement with an actual argument or anything.
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But the extra $17 in my paycheck really goes a long way
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TheVipaGTS posted...

WHAT!? i'm shocked!

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Then why is job market wide open right now? It's easy to get work in the current climate, a seekers market.
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As long as Mexico paid for that badass wall that made illegals a non issue..
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TheVipaGTS posted...

WHAT!? i'm shocked!

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Zeeak4444 posted...

FLUFFYGERM posted...

That's a shitty Opinion piece with a bunch of caveats and nuances in the article and a clickbait headline to lure in the naive for click revenue.

No bias here, surely no need to back up this statement with an actual argument or anything.

The only bias in this topic is from the people who read the headline and ran with it without reading the rest of the Opinion piece.
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voldothegr8 posted...

Then why is job market wide open right now? It's easy to get work in the current climate, a seekers market.

Wages aren't keeping up with rising costs. Doesn't matter too much if you have a job if you're not making enough.

opinion article, who cares
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People dismissing it as an opinion article, do you have anything to counter it, or are you just shitposting?

Aye posted...

People dismissing it as an opinion article, do you have anything to counter it, or are you just shitposting?

FLUFFYGERM posted...

That's a shitty Opinion piece with a bunch of caveats and nuances in the article and a clickbait headline to lure in the naive for click revenue.

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What are these caveats and nuances that render it meaningless?
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

Aye posted...

People dismissing it as an opinion article, do you have anything to counter it, or are you just shitposting?

FLUFFYGERM posted...

That's a shitty Opinion piece with a bunch of caveats and nuances in the article and a clickbait headline to lure in the naive for click revenue.

Want to point out what the article got wrong?

Dragon239 posted...

What are these caveats and nuances that render it meaningless?

Why don't you read the article and highlight the concessions made therein and then see if the headline is or isn't clickbait?
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Aye posted...

People dismissing it as an opinion article, do you have anything to counter it, or are you just shitposting?

Don't forget that Trump himself said that negative news are fake.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/994179864436596736

The Fake News is working overtime. Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy & all things else, 91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake). Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away credentials?

Notice how he writes "negative (Fake)" as if being negative meant being fake.

Trump encourages people to simply dismiss any negative coverage as being fake. This way they don't actually have to counter any of the points that are made.
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

Why don't you read the article and highlight the concessions made therein and then see if the headline is or isn't clickbait?

why don't you just back up your claim?
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ThanksUglyGod posted...

That can't be true. I thought the billionaire real-estate mogul would give a voice to the working class.

Who knew, huh?
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

Dragon239 posted...

What are these caveats and nuances that render it meaningless?

Why don't you read the article and highlight the concessions made therein and then see if the headline is or isn't clickbait?

So you're just shitposting then. Good to know

TheVipaGTS posted...

FLUFFYGERM posted...

Why don't you read the article and highlight the concessions made therein and then see if the headline is or isn't clickbait?

why don't you just back up your claim?

Because the vast majority of left-leaning CEmen are utterly dishonest and don't deserve the effort of doing their reading for them.
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

TheVipaGTS posted...

FLUFFYGERM posted...

Why don't you read the article and highlight the concessions made therein and then see if the headline is or isn't clickbait?

why don't you just back up your claim?

Because the vast majority of left-leaning CEmen are utterly dishonest and don't deserve the effort of doing their reading for them.

so you can't back up your claim, then. alright.
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

TheVipaGTS posted...

FLUFFYGERM posted...

Why don't you read the article and highlight the concessions made therein and then see if the headline is or isn't clickbait?

why don't you just back up your claim?

Because the vast majority of left-leaning CEmen are utterly dishonest and don't deserve the effort of doing their reading for them.

"everyone who disagrees with me is left leaning! Meanwhile, I'm an 'in the know' libertarian who thinks UBI is necessary but capitalism is also already perfect in its inherent form."

Fluffygerm in a nutshell.
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Aye posted...

FLUFFYGERM posted...

Dragon239 posted...

What are these caveats and nuances that render it meaningless?

Why don't you read the article and highlight the concessions made therein and then see if the headline is or isn't clickbait?

So you're just shitposting then. Good to know

It's FLUFFYGERM, that's what he does.
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A few months ago, I cautioned that Americans should be patient before deciding what effect President Donald Trumps tax cuts have had on the economy. It takes a while for companies to make investment decisions, more time for those decisions to be implemented and even more time for the resulting changes in labor demand to bid up workers wages. It therefore takes months or even years before the full impact of the tax bill will be known.

But its also important to evaluate policies like Trumps tax reform as quickly as possible. Not only is this critical for deciding whether to change course, but as more time goes on, the effects of a policy can become harder to assess. Two years from now, plenty of other things will have had time to affect the economy, including Trumps trade war and natural economic forces. And now that the tax cut has been in effect for a half-year, the results are starting to trickle in.

First, the tax reform hasnt yet resulted in appreciably higher wages for American workers. Real average hourly compensation actually fell in the first quarter after the tax reform was passed:

Official data for the second quarter isnt available yet, but private data isnt looking encouraging. PayScales index of real wages shows a dramatic deterioration in the period:

But perhaps two quarters is too early to expect results in this area. A better gauge might be business investment if the tax reform is spurring businesses to increase capital expenditure, as it was supposed to do, then wage increases will probably follow in due course.

ome have expressed dismay that stock buybacks seem to have taken precedence over boosting capital investment. Since the tax cuts passed, companies have been using buybacks to return record amounts of cash to shareholders more than $700 billion in the first two quarters. That naturally raises the possibility that companies dont have good projects to invest in. If companies pass their tax windfall on to shareholders, those investors can choose to react by increasing consumption meaning more of societys resources go to the wealthy. They can also choose to invest the money in other companies with better growth prospects but if those companies are also reacting by returning the money to their shareholders, rather than making capital expenditures, not much is getting accomplished.

So is any of the tax-cut windfall being used to finance the capital expenditure that the economy needs? Private nonresidential fixed investment did increase as a share of the economy in the first two quarters since the reform was passed:

But the level still remains below the high set back in 2015.

Huge, immediate gains for wealthy shareholders combined with tepid increases in business investment and decreases in real wages dont paint a flattering picture of the tax cuts impact so far. There is, however, a possibility that the tax cut has acted as a Keynesian fiscal stimulus, helping to push down unemployment.

But thats not exactly the long-term structural improvement that the bills supporters advertised. And as a recent research note from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco points out, fiscal stimulus in good economic times is less effective than in recessions. And growth hasnt really sped up either real per capita gross domestic product growth was only 1.34 percent in the first quarter, below 2017s pace, and considerably less than in 2014 and 2015:
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This tepid rate of growth means that the tax cut is unlikely to pay for itself. By this point, almost all economists recognize that income tax cuts no longer stimulate the economy enough to reduce deficits, as supply-siders thought they would back in the 1980s. But economists still held out some hope that lowering the corporate tax, which is believed to be more harmful than the personal income tax, would have a more salutary effect on the budget. Unfortunately, that hope appears to be fading, as fiscal deficits increase rapidly.

Theres still the possibility that Trumps tax reform will bear fruit in the long term. But early results are pointing to another possibility that tax cuts have run their course as an economic policy.

These changes take time to roll out. Sometimes years. Democrats have already been swearing up and down that they're going to repeal the tax cuts, so large companies are understandably hesitant to roll out the capital investment at break-neck speed. The writer acknowledged all of these caveats, saying that there's still time to review the results, it's been only a couple quarters, we're still waiting on official data, etc.

Yet we're still seeing that as the labor market tightens, competition for workers goes up. Which means that companies are offering more benefits like maternity leave, college education subsidies, paid-for lunch, more job training, and even higher wages. As the market tightens even more, that will continue.

It's painfully obvious that the dishonest individuals who ran with the clickbait headline didn't even bother to analyze the article for what it's really saying.
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I got over a 20% pay hike, but I knew this wasn't all roses for America at large.
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hockeybub89 posted...

I got over a 20% pay hike, but I knew this wasn't all roses for America at large.

It's been just a couple of quarters. In that time we've hit a record number of open jobs and low unemployment. At that rate things can only get better, these massive changes don't propagate quickly.
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

So is any of the tax-cut windfall being used to finance the capital expenditure that the economy needs? Private nonresidential fixed investment did increase as a share of the economy in the first two quarters since the reform was passed:

But the level still remains below the high set back in 2015.

I like the last line being added to discredit the increases.
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SK8T3R215 posted...

FLUFFYGERM posted...

So is any of the tax-cut windfall being used to finance the capital expenditure that the economy needs? Private nonresidential fixed investment did increase as a share of the economy in the first two quarters since the reform was passed:

But the level still remains below the high set back in 2015.

I like the last line being added to discredit the increases.

The entire piece is just an attempt to weasel in justification for the clickbait headline. And the incredibly dishonest usual suspects are going to slurp it up and shitpost.
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All those caveats you highlighted are pretty much the same thing you'd find in any scientific publication. There's nothing in there that contradicts the fact that the tax cuts haven't done anything for workers. It's basically just an academic way of saying that he's working with the data he has. You're basically attacking the article for being careful.

Are you going to say that evolution is just opinion because they call it a theory?
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Trump being a business man as usual.
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frozenshock posted...

All those caveats you highlighted are pretty much the same thing you'd find in any scientific publication. There's nothing in there that contradicts the fact that the tax cuts haven't done anything for workers. It's basically just an academic way of saying that he's working with the data he has. You're basically attacking the article for being careful.

Are you going to say that evolution is just opinion because they call it a theory?

He wasn't careful with his headline, which is dishonest clickbait. Someone who acknowledges that it can take years to see the changes, that it's only been a couple quarters, etc, shouldn't post premature pronouncements just to get the left's approval.

Especially when we are seeing positive results from the tightening job market making it competitive to get good workers.
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shockthemonkey posted...

frozenshock posted...

All those caveats you highlighted are pretty much the same thing you'd find in any scientific publication. There's nothing in there that contradicts the fact that the tax cuts haven't done anything for workers. It's basically just an academic way of saying that he's working with the data he has. You're basically attacking the article for being careful.

Are you going to say that evolution is just opinion because they call it a theory?

Yeah thats pretty much what I got from the piece. Its not really saying that tax cuts couldnt help workers; its saying that it hasnt yet.

And the person who wrote it has acknowledged that it can take years to see the results. A building doesn't get built overnight.
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Oh, that was all the stuff I noticed. I figured you had something more, for lack of a better word, "damning."

But I guess you're probably responding to the people who went all-caps and exclamation points pretty quickly, so, fair enough.

Saying that:
Not sure why you highlighted
"First, the tax reform hasnt yet resulted in appreciably higher wages for American workers. Real average hourly compensation actually fell in the first quarter after the tax reform was passed"

and

"Theres still the possibility that Trumps tax reform will bear fruit in the long term. But early results are pointing to another possibility that tax cuts have run their course as an economic policy."

Though. The first, especially. That seems fairly straight-forward, no? The second seems just basic honesty - the most you can say about ANYTHING that is in-progress. "It's not doing anything, but it might in the future, I am not a psychic", isn't it?

The article isn't lying. It said it's yet to do anything, but notes that that can change going forward, and posted some stats about what has happened so far, both gains and losses.

E: Ah, bunch of people posted before me saying more or less the same, so, eh.
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voldothegr8 posted...

Then why is job market wide open right now? It's easy to get work in the current climate, a seekers market.

And that doesn't all depend on where you live.
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lmao y'all respondin to proudclad
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So FLUFFYGERMs entire point of contention is that the author is using cautious language?

I got a raise and a bonus directly because of Trump's tax cuts
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The money I'm saving due to the tax cuts is a free trip to Vegas. To add to that, I coincidently received a larger than usual pay raise and bonus.

I will gladly take these things over absolutely nothing Hillary would have given (or taken)
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https://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-get-big-pay-bump-not-2022-analyst-says-135622639.html

credit goes to @Balrog0
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