In an interview on Power & Politics, (David Paterson, Ontario’s representative in Washington) told host David Cochrane that the Canadians and Americans had a 90-minute meeting and the first half-hour was “a master class” from Lutnick in breaking down the U.S. position on tariffs.
The focus of the U.S. government is dealing with its yearly deficit in federal spending, Paterson said. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the federal government ran a $1.83 trillion US deficit in the 2024 fiscal year.
There are three ways the U.S. government is working to cut down that deficit, Paterson added.
The first is a major budget resolution that calls for billions of dollars in tax cuts, and the second is slashing the size of government through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The third is tariffs, which are meant to be a new revenue source and attract investment into the United States.
The politicians don’t believe it, they just have to say it. The people voting for it see themselves as also getting a tax cut, which they want.
The funny thing is the tax cuts will only help those making over $360k/yr.
Oh is that actually the case this time around? I remember the 2017 cuts by revenue mostly affected the top whatever but the poor still had a tax cut, it’s just the amount of money saved was, by definition, significantly less than it was for the top earners.
The biggest factor in transfering wealth to the wealthy from those tax cuts was the cut in corporate tax rates as a boost to stock market, while keeping economy down enough for Fed to keep QE and low interest rates, further boosting stock market and bonds.
I believe the way it worked was - the middle and lower class tax cuts had a built-in sunset and the upper class tax cuts were permanent. That way it looked like everyone got a cut, but really it was just a temporary relief for the poors and a real transfer of wealth to the upper echelons.
I don’t believe they’re engaging in such pageantry this time. But I’m not an American, maybe someone will correct me.
You’re right on all counts. The last 4 years they’ve finally perfected the propaganda bubble they started after the impeachment of Nixon, so they don’t have to hide anything anymore. They don’t have use loopholes, or hidden time bombs, or anything. They can straight up say the quiet part out loud, and put on paper exactly what they want, and their media will just bald-face lie about it to the public, and there are no consequences.
Hell, they released their whole plan (Project 2025) with nothing redacted or disguised in euphemism or anything, a full year before the election, so everyone had plenty of time to see the full, real picture, and they still won quite handily. I don’t know how we recover from this.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trump_tax_proposals._2024_election._Average_tax_change_by_income_group_in_2026.png
This seems… Odd. One of the big tax promises in Nevada and I think Arizona was no taxes on the tips. Either that’s not included here or no one making tip wages makes less than 157k a year?