2020 Democratic Primary Thread: Focus on House & Senate races

[No1]

How so?

You got people being accused of being agents and other shyt.

 

[Berniewood Hogan]

 

[Dusty Bake Activate]

The incentives to avoid Warren's head tax are there with Bernie's payroll tax as well, just through a different mechanism, because both have small-business carveouts. Liz's are based on employee headcount (<50) and Bernie's is based on employee payroll (<$2M), so yes, you can avoid payroll tax. Any incentive for a large employer to break themselves apart to game the system via headcount are present in the payroll tax route as well. But again, this is chicken little territory because the ACA has the exact same 50 employee headcount carveout trigger and, as you just admitted, it hasn't caused massive waves of contracting. For the vast majority of businesses, the idea of voluntarily breaking up or undergoing existentially large corporate reorganization all to avoid paying 2% less in healthcare costs is ridiculous.

There are ways to avoid a head tax and it's easy to do. It can also be made easier by legislation designed to sabotage it, which the Repubs will surely do.

What I do know is that there have been massive waves of contracting that have occurred concurrently with and before the implementation of the ACA. To what degree or not the ACA has contributed to the increase in contracting I'm not sure, as I haven't researched it really. The point is head taxes are easily avoided.

I don't know what you keep talking about voluntarily breaking up and acting like avoiding the head tax is difficult to do. Do you really live in America? Not even being facetious. I've worked at various jobs where they replace employees with contractors like nothing all the time. I don't why you're acting like it's some kinda Sisyphean task. The only thing ridiculous is you talking about the undisputed increase in contracting and outsourcing and the concerted, powerful effort behind it, then saying you know it won't happen in response to this plan.

I don't know if you've really thought through what you're saying. Why do you think jobs do labor reorganization practices already? It's to save money, and that money is in the form of wages and yes, healthcare. I've sat in these meetings before where it's discussed. I've watched co-workers be replaced with contractors. The question is not will Liz' plan cause a drastic uptick in contracting, but rather since businesses are ALREADY contracting and doing other clever labor reorganization practices, how you can depend on the projected revenue from the head tax to remain steady?

Man, do you really believe the difference between M4A passing and M4A being shot down is whether 1/3 of the funding is raised via an employer-side head tax vs an employer-side payroll tax? This is some real forest for the trees shyt. There are currently only 15 Senators who claim to support this bill, and only 2 of them are going to bat for it now that it's game time. And you're sitting here actively arguing against building out a broader coalition of support across social movements because you think you can smuggle fukking MEDICARE FOR ALL through in the dead of the night without people noticing if you make it skinny and "robust" enough. That's an opinion borne out of typical anxious Democratic posture and belies a misunderstanding of the political reality we're living in. The road to passing M4A does not deviate along the lines of payroll tax vs head tax. The people you're hoping to appease with these maneuvers are going to fight against M4A anyway because they're profiting off of the bloat of the current healthcare system. No amount of crossed t's or dotted i's will magically swing them over to our side. I don't understand how you can reference the sabotaging of the ACA and believe that Obama's problem was that he wasn't careful enough in his policy design as opposed to ideological constraints. The fight is coming, don't play yourself. All M4A plans are chock-full of assumptions and moving parts. There are assumptions about pricing and administrative efficiencies and job transformations and business reactions, etc in both Bernie and Liz's plans. These exact same lines you're using here against Liz will be used by right-wing forces when President Sanders tries to pass M4A. We're talking about the biggest institutional transformation in our lifetimes here. If you're crying uncle at a head tax vs a payroll tax, you ain't built for this, I'm just being real.

And my point stands that there is practically no avenue to pass M4A at this point in history (ironically in part because of the attitude you're displaying right now), so the practical benefit of M4A discussions is not about designing the plan as it will actually exist, but rather designing a plan that will shift the Overton Window and building the mass levels of public support that will be needed to actually eventually get it passed. This is why Ady Barkan was praising Liz for this move, she did the work to make M4A more palatable to the general public while simultaneously harnessing the power of other mass movements. Her brilliance here is not in designing an optimal universal health care funding bill (although it's pretty damn close), but in designing an optimal universal health care funding strategy in this political environment. Calling it disastrous as Breunig did is some Bitter Bernie Bro bullshyt. Bernie's vision is an increase in payroll taxes plus an increase in income taxes for all brackets over $29K, so that's certainly not just high percentage brackets. That universality is both a boon and a hurdle.

And Liz's plan doesn't necessitate waiting on immigration reform and tax reform being passed before M4A can be implemented, because those are funding mechanisms and government programs spend before they fund. The order would be a political calculation, the same as it would be for Bernie and his various funding mechanisms.

lol man if you don't gtfoh with this melodramatic waxing philosophical. This is how you tricked yourself into supporting Donald Trump and concocted all these fantastical scenarios about Trump outflanking Democrats to the left on healthcare, wages, LGBT issues, etc. and how the Bernie wing would form a 3rd party leading the Democrats running a Rubio-Booker ticket in 2020. You live in a bubble where you evaluate policy based on its appeal to how you think it would work in some abstract simulation. You like Warren's plan cause you're a wonk like her and it makes you feel all tingly to think about, not that it's the best route to go.

You claim to be a progressive now (I think) and support a plan that supports a head tax, a patently anti-progressive idea because of its distribution and percentage of income favoring high income earners over middle and low, then you call me leveling right-wing criticism at you when I point out that it makes businesses that pay more for their workers healthcare subsidize business who give their workers shytty healthcare and over differences between employer-side and employee-side taxes...as if the larger, more significant difference in progressive and conservative ideology here isn't the distribution in which a $25000 income and a $200000 income get taxed the same amount.

Anyway, you typed all that shyt for nothing because I said nothing about the head tax vs. payroll tax being a hindrance to getting it passed. What I said was Liz' plan with the head tax has much more of a chance to be picked apart and neutered and that is indisputable to anyone with any common sense. Another reason a payroll tax is superior other than a. it can't be avoided easily like a head tax, and b. it has progressive income distribution is c. it can't as easily be sabotaged once it's law.

The problem with Liz' plan is it requires a multitude of dubious assumptions and projections acting perfectly in concert with each other along with other large-scale reforms of immigration, the tax code, labor, etc. and many of these moving parts have the capacity to ruin it. And of course Bernie and any other politician who attempts something as large healthcare reform uses a lot of projections and CBO data, etc. but this plan is kind of a monstrosity right out of the Democratic party think tank playbook. I could see Kamala Harris wheeling out this shyt. You should've learned from the clusterfukk that is the ACA what can be done to sabotage something like this, and of course the Repubs will. That's what I meant by "robust"...a sturdy legislative framework.

Look, in order for Liz plan to work as it says, the employer contribution constant has to hold $9 trillion. And of course it will because there's no way any employers will avoid it through labor practices because King Kreole said so. Then there are a lot of projections on savings based on raising corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, etc. probably a lot of the same shyt Bernie would do, plus $400 billion projected dependent upon immigration reform, and supposedly cracking down on IRS tax avoidance can bring in $2.3 trillion.

What if none of that works as projected? What is the Repubs and corporate Dems sabotage it from different angles? Before you say I'm scaremongering like a Republican, I'll tell you what will happen. She will have raise taxes. The head tax will have to increase, or you might have to raise payroll taxes. This is where the political element comes in. She already painted herself in a corner politically by declaring middle class taxes won't go up. Meanwhile, if Bernie's plan doesn't go swimmingly well he already told you your taxes were going up.

That's why I can't wait til hopefully it gets down to Bernie vs Liz in friendly competition and when she has to explain her plan in the debate and she starts juelzing about taxes vs. fees and talking about head taxes and immigration reform and Urban Institute studies and Bernie just says...



Let's see who wins the day.

And as I mentioned, and you yourself agreed with, labor reorganization is a broad, long-term trend that is not the result of government healthcare expansion. The 50 headcount incentive is far too small for the kind of exponential increase in mass displacement and labor reorganization you're forecasting, which is why we didn't see a massive wave of 50 headcount companies pop up when the ACA implemented the exact same incentive.

This has already been discussed by why are you stuck on the 50 head count? Independent contractors are exempt from the employee contribution regardless of how many employees they have. Even if a company has 10,000 employees they still save money on the head tax by contracting out.

About the 50 head count thing I'm still at you saying I'm aiming right wing criticism at you because you see commonalities in critiques about the ACA, when the ACA was a right wing brainchild of the Heritage Foundation. The criticism that employers would spin off workers to avoid the 50 head count may have been used by Repubs cause they were haters, but it wasn't an ideologically right wing criticism. Progressives said the same thing. It was a valid criticism of a trash ass milquetoast center right policy, but we accepted it while holding our noses because it was better than the status quo. You be confusing yourself.

 

[Secure Da Bag]

There's no way it'll be 4% income tax. It's already 2.9. I would have to be a bit higher to cover kids, unemployed, and seniors. Otherwise, I agree with that was said.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

goddamn sanders is an idiot

 

[King Kreole]

Aight I think we're circling the drain here and blowing up the thread, so in the interest of brevity I'll wind this discussion down.

Again, no there is no way I'm aware of that payroll taxes can be avoided. If you know of one, please explain, but the way payroll taxes work is, you work, you're taxed period. There are ways to avoid a head tax and it's easy to do. It can also be made easier by legislation designed to sabotage it, which the Repubs will surely do.

What I do know is that there have been massive waves of contracting that have occurred concurrently with and before the implementation of the ACA. To what degree or not the ACA has contributed to the increase in contracting I'm not sure, as I haven't researched it really. The point is there is a way to avoid the head tax.

I don't know what you keep talking about voluntarily breaking up and acting like avoiding the head tax is difficult to do, Do you really live in America? Not even being facetious. I've worked at various jobs where they replace employees with contractors like nothing all the time. I don't why you're acting like it's some kinda Sisyphean task. The only thing ridiculous is you talking about the undisputed increase in contracting and outsourcing and the concerted, powerful effort behind it, then saying you know it won't happen in response to this plan.

I don't know if you've really thought through what you're saying. Why do you think jobs do labor reorganization practices already? It's to save money, and that money is in the form of wages and yes, healthcare. I've sat in these meetings before where it's discussed. The question is not will Liz' plan cause a drastic uptick in contracting, but rather since businesses are ALREADY contracting and doing other clever labor reorganization practices, how you can depend on the projected revenue from the head tax to remain steady?

I just told you how you avoid the payroll tax; the same way you avoid the head tax. By getting below the trigger rate. For head tax, it's 50 employees. For payroll tax, it's $2M in payroll. Contrary to conservative fear-mongering about this very thing, there has been absolutely no evidence the ACA caused mass corporate restructuring to avoid the employer mandate, but I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about whether continuing this exact same carveout mechanism would for some reason now trigger an exponential increase in mass restructuring from corporations looking to avoid 2% decrease in health care expenditures. Liz, rightly, has complementary policies to fight back against employee misclassification but put it in her labor plan because it's a labor issue, not a health care issue.

lol man if you don't gtfoh with this melodramatic waxing philosophical. This is how you tricked yourself into supporting Donald Trump and concocted all these fantastical scenarios about Trump outflanking Democrats to the left on healthcare, wages, LGBT issues, etc. and how the Bernie wing would form a 3rd party leading the Democrats running a Rubio-Booker ticket in 2020. You live in a bubble where you evaluate policy based on its appeal to how you would think it would work in some abstract simulation. You like Warren's plan cause you're a wonk like her and it makes you feel all tingly to think about, not that it's the best route to go.

You claim to be a progressive now (I think) and support a plan that supports a head tax, a patently anti-progressive idea because of its distribution and percentage of income favoring high income earners over middle and low, then you call me leveling right-wing criticism at you when I point out that it makes businesses that pay more for their workers healthcare subsidize business who give their workers shytty healthcare and over differences between employer-side and employee-side taxes...as if the larger, more significant difference in progressive and conservative ideology here isn't the distribution in which a $25000 income and a $200000 income get taxed the same amount.

Anyway, I said nothing about the head tax vs. payroll tax being a hindrance to getting it passed. What I said was Liz' plan with the head tax has much more of a chance to be picked apart and neutered and that is indisputable to anyone with any common sense. Another reason a payroll tax is superior other than a. it can't be avoided like a head tax, and b. it has progressive income distribution is c. it can't as easily be sabotaged once it's law.

Yet again you've resorted to ad-hominems and non sequitur, and haven't really provided much worth responding to here. It seems you're still intent on peddling the right-wing canard that taxing employers is the same thing as taxing employees simply because it allows you to stick to your priors that Liz Warren is really some anti-progressive fraud, just like you did when you were in here peddling the pregnancy and Native American smears. An employer-side head tax doesn't favor high-income earners over middle or low-income earners, it just makes businesses make a decision around how to allocate their post-tax funds. I mean, Kshama fukkin Sawant is pushing for a head tax in Seattle. Your beliefs only make sense if you hold current profit margins ratios and labor relations slanted towards the wealthy to be sacrosanct and natural law. It's literally the exact same argument anti-wage increase forces make.



There is no inherent correlation between an increase in business expenses/taxes and a reduction in low-wage incomes. In the face of this head tax (which, I would be remiss if I didn't again yell, decreases health care expenses by 2%) , a firm could just as easily keep their lower-end wages the same (or even increase them! because there is no increase in tax burden the more an employee makes like there is under a payroll tax!) and lower their higher-end wages or run with leaner profit margins or even give all workers a 2% raise with their M4A head tax savings! It is a political business choice. Which is why Liz has baked into this health care plan, as well as her labor plan, incentivizes unionization so the "loser" of this political business choice is less likely to be the working class.

Look, in order for Liz plan to work as it says, the employer contribution constant has to hold $9 trillion. And of course it will because there's no way any employers will avoid it through labor practices because King Kreole said so. Then there are a lot of projections on savings based on raising corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, etc. probably a lot of the same shyt Bernie would do, plus $400 billion projected dependent upon immigration reform, and supposedly cracking down on IRS tax avoidance can bring in $2.3 trillion.

What if none of that works as projected? What is the Repubs and corporate Dems sabotage it from different angles? Before you say I'm scaremongering like a Republican, I'll tell you what will happen. She will have raise taxes. The head tax will have to increase, or you might have to raise payroll taxes. This is where the political element comes in. She already painted herself in a corner by declaring middle class taxes won't go up. Then when that happens her presidency is done and the whole progressive movement takes a hit.

Have you ever heard of this thing called "deficit spending"? It's why Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and the entire government didn't immediately vanish once the expenses for these services outran their funding. Again, we're seeing you push right-wing deficit hawk economic theory. It's classic Republican fear-mongering to spread the idea that we have to decide between either raising middle-class taxes or cutting (or not even implementing, as you're arguing here) public services like Social Security or Medicare (for All) or Medicaid if the funding dollars don't match the spending dollars. You can join Pelosi in attempting to kneecap the progressive movement with ridiculous PAYGO rules, I don't fukk with that shyt. And I'm actually glad you're pushing this stuff because it's the same attacks we'll see when Liz or Bernie becomes the nominee and I'm glad everyone here gets to peep game on this fraudulent crap.

I think we're pretty much done here, so I'll give you the last word.

 

[King Kreole]

goddamn sanders is an idiot

Bernie man...damn this ain't it...this a terrible look

Can we at least see your damn funding plan first before you talk cash shyt

All he's released is a series of various options...a menu ain't a meal

 

[afterlife2009]

Biden Boyz strong af can't even flex anymore

 

[dora_da_destroyer]

Put grandpa in a home.

edit: just saw the other angle

 

[Berniewood Hogan]

 

[Pull Up the Roots]

Pete and his team are really pushing the "black people are biased against Pete because they're huge homophobes" angle hard.

 

[Dusty Bake Activate]

Aight I think we're circling the drain here and blowing up the thread, so in the interest of brevity I'll wind this discussion down.


I just told you how you avoid the payroll tax; the same way you avoid the head tax. By getting below the trigger rate. For head tax, it's 50 employees. For payroll tax, it's $2M in payroll. Contrary to conservative fear-mongering about this very thing, there has been absolutely no evidence the ACA caused mass corporate restructuring to avoid the employer mandate, but I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about whether continuing this exact same carveout mechanism would for some reason now trigger an exponential increase in mass restructuring from corporations looking to avoid 2% decrease in health care expenditures. Liz, rightly, has complementary policies to fight back against employee misclassification but put it in her labor plan because it's a labor issue, not a health care issue.

Do you really mean to tell me this whole time you've been talking to me, you don't understand that by turning workers in to contractors, business get to avoid the head tax and the contractors don't have to pay the head tax either???

Is this why you've focusing on the 50 head count and harkening back to the ACA every fukking post?

Well you've been missing the entire point that myself, Matt Bruenig, Bernies Sanders himself etc. are saying.

Under Liz' plan contractors don't have to pay the head tax. Therefore when jobs contract and outsource away work, they get to avoid the head tax and so do the contractor. So therefore an increase in contracting will result in lost revenue in the form of a head tax. This could lead to a situation in which head taxes are increased to make up revenue, which in turns leads to more contracting and it snowballs.

The 50 head count trigger isn't even really that relevant here. Whether a company has 49 workers or 10,000 workers they still save money by contracting away jobs to avoid paying workers. You don't run into this problem with a payroll tax because if they contract jobs away to save money, those contract workers still pay payroll taxes!

Did you really not understand this the whole time?

Anyway, thanks for wasting my time. Feel free to keep calling Bernie Sanders, Jacobin and other democratic socialists right wingers for caring too much about regressive employer-side tax distribution.

Edit: I didn’t respond to the rest of your post but for the record there is no Native American smear, she smeared herself and I never said anything about her pregnancy.

 

[Atlrocafella]

Biden Boyz strong af can't even flex anymore

we outside for real.

 

[FukkaPaidEmail]

A certain group of posters did not like those poll numbers at all

 

[Atlrocafella]

A certain group of posters did not like those poll numbers at all

Call em out breh. Cause a while back it was “but but but he won’t hold that lead after the debates..”