How much is your local "Trump at the Pump Tax?"

Discussion in 'Fred's House of Pancakes' started by Georgina Rudkus, Mar 26, 2026.

  1. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    How well has it worked to look at any effort to regulate abuses by unprincipled players under capitalism, and paint it as "confiscation!" and "government control!" ?
     
  2. hill

    hill High Fiber Member

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    "Abuse" (not paying Gavin newsom's $25/hr wage to flip burgers) is often the eye of the beholder. Those wages are passed on as higher burger prices & drive customers away & shut the Burger Joint down in many instances. Shopkeeper moves out of jurisdiction of stupidity and then is able to put other people to work that pay taxes in their state
     
  3. Leadfoot J. McCoalroller

    Leadfoot J. McCoalroller Senior Member

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    Just another facet of the housing shortage.

    Even at $25/hr suggests they should be paying no more than $1170/mo for rent, and you just don't see apartments (or shares thereof) that cheap anymore. Even Bakersfield is higher than that these days.

    The way to cheaper burger flippers is more available housing and lower rent.
     
    fuzzy1 and futurist like this.
  4. Mr.Vanvandenburg

    Mr.Vanvandenburg Senior Member

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    Pretty close to that, nowhere in the tax cut for the rich does it say there has to be customers, just be rich. Have you heard customers are the job creators from a republican? We want tax cuts for the rich because “they are the job creators” is nothing but a lie. There are already tons of tax cuts for business, too many. The NOL term is like twenty years now. It started out as one or two years to enable some tax relief from losses.
     
  5. Winston Smith

    Winston Smith Active Member

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    In other words, you've never heard anyone claim that a business with no customers is an excellent engine of job growth. If you heard a proposal for reduced taxation as stimulus and only "just be rich" got through, you might question whether you got the whole message.

    If you were to borrow the capital to start a business relying on "tax cuts for the rich", but no one bought your goods or services, how would you ever see a benefit from that?

    No, but that also wouldn't be true. A demand for lemonade doesn't itself create the chain of growers, transport and retail facilities that allow anyone to sell lemonade. It isn't the customers who plant and maintain the orchards, and invest in the equipment and labor to pick and transport.

    I have certainly heard republicans extol the demand side effects of reduced income taxation. Consumers with a reduced tax burden have more money to spend on consumption. This has been a message from republican candidates since Kemp-Roth.

    It also isn't a faithful rendition of the position, which would actually be something more like We don't want to overtax innovators and investors who bring large social and economic benefits, including employment which is all reasonable and true.

    Not taxing businesses with a net operating loss isn't a tax cut. Bringing anger and misunderstanding into a discussion of economics helps no one, but does re-enforce a stereotype about Prius drivers.
     
    #985 Winston Smith, Jul 25, 2026 at 5:25 PM
    Last edited: Jul 25, 2026 at 8:12 PM
  6. Rmay635703

    Rmay635703 Senior Member

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    you are about 60 years out of date.

    Many business models that should be illegal survive on just what you describe, getting investment in a business that makes no money while you yourself get rich.

    Back in the 80’s one of our fearless leaders got rich off a string of business failures.
    Other leaders got wealthy off the savings and loan failures.
    Sun capital got wealthy off Shopko by using it to take out large loans to pay themselves exorbitant unearned salaries . Usurpury but it’s ok because they are an investor.
     
  7. Winston Smith

    Winston Smith Active Member

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    So, not reliant on "tax cuts for the rich".
     
  8. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    Those 'failures' were usually only on portions of his total business operation. The most publicly visible portion, sharing business risks with 'partners'.

    His other portions were kept to himself and family, not shared with partners, and were structured to extract plenty of profit from their dealings with the shared portions. I.e. share the risks of losses, but don't share the highest and most certain profit potentials. And make sure his closely held profits on the private internal side, exceeded his slice of the losses on the partnered external side.

    Thus, his overall personal business were relatively successful (though less so than the overall stock market). While his partners were left holding the bags.

    I was not anywhere near among the first to see that partnering with him was financially foolish. There was a reason why, in the 1990s, he could no longer get financing from domestic sources, so had to turn overseas to other 'lenders' or 'partners' with motives other than simple profit.
     
    #988 fuzzy1, Jul 25, 2026 at 8:19 PM
    Last edited: Jul 25, 2026 at 8:25 PM
  9. Zeppo Shanski

    Zeppo Shanski Active Member

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    I’d love to hear and learn a lot more about “Prius Driver” stereotypes.
     
  10. Trollbait

    Trollbait It's a D&D thing

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    Why would someone grow lemons and make lemonade if there isn't someone willing to buy them.

    A core tenement of supply side economics is that removing burdens in the form of taxes and regulations from business owners and investors leads to economic growth. Which includes job growth according to the believers. Acolytes of trickledown find alliance with objectivists, who do label the owner class "job creators, in reducing taxes and regulations.

    They do so while ignoring the power of the demand side of the equation. This leads them to cut consumer and worker protections as part of the burden on the job creators, forgetting they don't make money without people able to spend money.

    The reality is an interaction of the two, but the Right, since at least Reagan, have been pushing tax cuts for business and upper brackets as good for the economy and "job creators" without evidence that it is actually so for all. Thus the counter cry of consumers are the job makers.
     
  11. Mr.Vanvandenburg

    Mr.Vanvandenburg Senior Member

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    Businesses aren’t planting orchards to create more oxygen. It’s about customers. It seems you don’t know what NOL means. I guess I missed my prius anger emotion, but I admit I stereotype you now as possibly a maga. You can be one it’s your right, one of the difficult parts of democracy is it can fail at the hands of a dictator. Maybe you are not maga, I don’t remember all of them here. A few stand out as blindly loyal for sure.
     
  12. Mr.Vanvandenburg

    Mr.Vanvandenburg Senior Member

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    #992 Mr.Vanvandenburg, Jul 25, 2026 at 11:20 PM
    Last edited: Jul 26, 2026 at 1:10 AM
  13. PriusTech

    PriusTech Active Member

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    Home complicated are these? Could it be DIY mods to standard appliances?
     
  14. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    Basically the love child of a heatless tumble dryer and a dehumidifier. If you had both of those things you might cleverly glom them together.
     
  15. Winston Smith

    Winston Smith Active Member

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    Exactly. Just as a demand with no supply isn't economic activity, a supply without a demand doesn't get us anywhere. Each is necessary.

    This wanders pretty far from the target of Mr.V's idea that

    Supply side stimulus in the form of lower costs for capital and production would stimulate that activity, just as demand side stimulus would stimulate demand. Is that genuinely controversial? Advocates of supply side stimulus don't deny that demand side stimulus is an economic stimulant, but that the effects can be different.

    Calling advocacy of supply side stimulus "Trickledown" advocates betrays a misunderstanding of the idea as a demand side stimulus filtered through the well off. That kind of misdirection is understandable as facile political rhetoric, but doesn't shed a lot of light.

    That some people are fascinated by Rand is undeniable, however her philosophy was one she struggled to distinguish from materialism. As a person who saw first hand the damage wrought by socialist materialism, I wonder how much of that error she incorporated without scrutiny.

    Neither of those ideas follows from recognizing the effects of supply side stimulus. That a supply side stimulus is proposed doesn't ignore demand side stimulus, and Kemp Roth cuts included cuts at low marginal FIT rates. Addressing "consumer and worker protections", i.e. burdens on the transactions in which consumers engage and regulation of employment through labor unions, isn't categorically anti-consumer or "worker".

    It does not deny the reality of the interaction of supply and demand to tout the benefits of supply side stimulus. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of people and their behaviour to offer one as the exclusive driver of employment.
     
    #995 Winston Smith, Jul 26, 2026 at 4:20 PM
    Last edited: Jul 26, 2026 at 5:47 PM
  16. Rmay635703

    Rmay635703 Senior Member

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    No reliant on Corporate welfare that directly subsidizes entities to be in business offloading risk to the public.
     
  17. Winston Smith

    Winston Smith Active Member

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