Massachusetts gets screwed under Republican tax plan

Their economy was, global business, technology, health care, education, real estate and finance, offshore the dirty stuff & farming, blue collar whites and immigrants serve the professors executives etc. If there was industry it was clean tech.

Which of these "other businesses" will not only offer livable salaries, but also the same benefits (employer-sponsored health coverage, paid sick and vacation leave, etc) that most higher ed and healthcare institutions provide? While also paying fair taxes....?

Mississippi.....

Schools and hospitals are low productivity? Feel free to move to a red state like West Virginia where they don't invest in education and healthcare. You can hang out with Trump voting obese illiterates and then die at a pathetically young age because red states have awful average life expectancy.

Young people are at a disadvantage to buy a home because there are not a lot of starter homes on the market right now, and home prices are a lot higher than they were a few years ago when the housing bubble burst.

I'm fairly young, not terribly wealthy, and I really love the mortgage deduction on my taxes. Granted, it only makes sense for me since I can also deduct state taxes and property taxes, otherwise I would just use the standard deduction.

Interestingly, this tax plan limits future home purchases that are eligible to take the mortgage deduction to a max of a $500,000 loan - which, unless you are making a sizable down payment on your mansion, is going to help the middle class more.

Old people don't usually benefit from the mortgage deduction. Many of them have no mortgage because they paid their house off. Or their mortgage is tiny because they bought many years ago when houses cost less. Very wealthy people often don't have mortgages. They just buy houses in cash or are trust fund brats like the Trumps and Bushes who inherit them from Daddy. Taking away the mortgage deduction hurts the middle class the most. Getting rid of the estate tax only helps super rich trust fund brats. The republicans only give a damn about the 1% and their tax plan shows exactly that.

The IRS under Obama story was a whole lot of nothing. Not one conservative group had their tax exempt status denied.

Funny how republicans complain about welfare yet all the tax cut hand outs go to republican states and the one percenters who have bought the republican party and make up Trumps cabinet.

We're a net payer of federal funds. One would think the red states who take from us would increase their standard of living to become closer to ours.

Vote Democrat and Republican again.

Donnie - Your premise that Massachusetts governance exudes contrary economic reality is not remotely accurate. In fact, your statements are not merely flawed but are also some combination of dishonest, incompetence and logical absurdity. You might want to take a bit of time to study what the GOP tax plan would actually do.

Among other things, it would cut the corporate tax rate from thirty-five per cent to twenty per cent; allow corporations to expense their capital investments immediately; set a new rate of twenty-five per cent for so-called pass-through businesses, such as partnerships and sole proprietorships; allow multinational corporations to repatriate trillions of dollars they are holding abroad at a low tax rate; abolish the estate tax; abolish the Alternative Minimum Tax; and reduce the number of personal-income tax brackets from seven to three.

The provisions of the plan are heavily slanted toward corporations and other types of businesses. According to figures compiled by Ed Wolff, an economist at N.Y.U., the richest ten per cent of U.S. households own more than eighty per cent of all stock-market wealth. And, as the market has risen in anticipation of the Trump tax plan passing, these wealthy households have already enjoyed a substantial windfall.

According to a preliminary analysis of the Trump plan by the Washington-based Tax Policy Center, taxpayers in the middle of the income distribution would get a tax cut of six hundred and sixty dollars a year—about one per cent of their incomes—while taxpayers at the very top of the distribution would see their post-tax incomes rise by $129,03 or 5.7 per cent.

The claim that cutting corporate taxes will generate a leap in corporate spending is based on the idea that firms have held off making capital investments because of high tax rates. As William Gale, an economist at the Brookings Institution, pointed out this week, “Over all, the cost of capital is already low.” To finance their investments, firms today can borrow at record-low interest rates.

Another argument sometimes made for corporate tax cuts is that, by reducing the amount of money firms have to give the federal government, they boost corporate cash flows and make it easier for firms to invest. But, as Gale also pointed out, “A lot of big firms right now don’t have cash-flow problems. They already have a lot of cash laying around.”

In reality, low rates of capital investment may not have much to do with the corporate tax rate—which is already a lot lower than thirty-five per cent when you take into account all the loopholes in the tax code that businesses can already exploit.

The real problem appears to be that many firms can’t see enough profitable investment projects, or sufficient demand for their products, to justify expanding capacity and upgrading their equipment. Rather than taking this risk, corporations are using their profits to buy back their own stock, a tactic that also just happens to benefit senior executives who own a lot of that stock. The Trump tax plan wouldn't do much to address this problem.

The 1986 tax-reform package, which the White House describes as a model for the Trump plan, cut the corporate tax rate from forty-six per cent to thirty-four per cent, Gale recalled, “but it’s not considered generally to have had a huge impact on investment.”

“Caveat emptor” to those who think this plan has any merit to the US economy - in fact, take a look at Kansas’ fiscal status if you want to get a real sense of what the future holds for the US economy under this GOP tax plan.