The Republicans, now in charge of House, Senate, and Presidency, succeeded in putting through a pretty decent tax cut right before Christmas. This tax cut will affect all Americans as of pretty much right now, January or February of 2018. If you want a summary of all the changes, this page lists them succinctly.
The tax cuts are actually pretty significant. The right-wing is celebrating, and the left-wing is screaming that they mostly benefit the rich and corporations, which for the most part is true. Not that it should bother you.
I have to separate my analysis of this into two very different parts: how this affects me personally (and people like me) and how this affects the United States as a nation. The bottom line is that these tax cuts are fantastic for me personally, but another big step towards collapse for the USA. I will explain.
How They Affect Me (And People Like Me)
For me, the self-employed Alpha Male 2.0 living in the US, in a state with no income tax, and paying American taxes, which are some of the highest in the world, these new tax cuts are fucking awesome. I am going to make many thousands of dollars more next year even if my net pretax income doesn’t rise (which it usually does). The cuts reduce taxes for corporations (I own one), reduce taxes on pass-through income (which is the vast majority of my income), reduce my tax bracket anywhere from 6% to 14% depending on how the numbers shake out next year, and eliminate some or all taxes earned abroad.
FUCK YES!
I’m going to have a very, very good year next year, due in no small part to these tax cuts. I am extremely pleased. Finally, Trump and the corporatist Republicans did something I actually like. (I guess one thing 1 out of 30 isn’t bad, right?)
Now the flip side…
How They Affect The USA As A Nation
While these tax cuts are great for people like me and you, they spell doom for the USA. The USA was already destined to collapse, of course, but as I explained here, cutting taxes while raising spending increases the debt, dampens economic growth in the long-term, and hastens the date at which your nation will collapse economically.
Exactly as I expected, Trump and the Republicans are now doing exactly what they always do when they’re in power (just like when Idiot Bush was president); they’re cutting taxes and raising spending, which will skyrocket the already insane debt and deficit. Proof of this: the very next bill Trump is working on after this tax cut is, I shit you not, a massive infrastructure spending bill. This is just after he increased military spending by $80 billion a year(!).
Fantastic.
Goodbye, America. It was nice knowing you.
If Tantrum Trump and the Republicans in power actually gave a shit about saving the USA, which they do not, they would not only cut taxes, but they’d also slash government spending all over the place like mad men. But since Republicans love big government, that’s never going to happen. Thus, America’s eventual collapse is inevitable (barring an unexpected technological revolution).
Do I care? Of course not. I haven’t cared about America for about 15 years. However, it’s very odd to me that the very people who say they care about the future of the country (right-wingers) vote for the very people who actively destroy it, while a guy like me who doesn’t give a shit at all, if I voted (which I don’t), would vote for people like Ron Paul who, love him or hate him, would be far less damaging to the nation long-term than corrupt corporatists like Idiot Bush or Tantrum Trump.
Isn’t that funny?
My Recommendation To You
My recommendation is, as always, to exploit your slowly collapsing society to extract as much personal benefit from it as you can while the getting is good. If dickheads like Tantrum Trump, the Lizard Queen, or Comrade Bernie are hell-bent on destroying this country and there is nothing you can do to stop them (which there isn’t), then you might as well make as much money as you can, while you can.
If you’re an American, you need to take advantage of these tax cuts right now. Make as much money as you can in 2018 and 2019. Most of these tax cuts end in 2026, but, as I’ve said before, we are one or two presidential cycles away from an openly socialist president as the nation continues to move to the left. If Comrade Bernie or one of his disciples takes the presidency and congress in 2020, you can virtually guarantee that these tax cuts will be completely eliminated by mid-2021.
This means you may only have four years to take advantage of these lower taxes. That’s not a lot of time.
Get your income up. Now. Start a business now if you haven’t yet. If you already have a business, work hard to expand it as fast as you can. If you have a business but you have not yet incorporated, do it right now so you can take advantage of these new low corporate taxes and pass-through income.
The clock is ticking. The faster you make money, the more of your money you’ll keep from these new lower taxes. It is entirely possible, and I mean this, that you will literally never see taxes this low in the United States ever again.
Enjoy the decline! And get to work!
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Wasn’t Comrade Bernie at least cognizant of the fact that increasing spending is bad? I think his vision of making the US like the USSR in the 50s is just smoke and mirrors. That being said, I prefer Ron Paul over all of them. I really wish it was his 2nd term, things would be soooooo much better.
I feel like Dubya kind of started a new trend of presidents who have completely mastered the art of increasing spending no matter how high the taxes are. Before him it was kind of an experiment, but Dubya and the neocons mastered it. Thoughts?
That being said, its nice that taxes are gonna be low for awhile. I’m certainly going to take advantage of it. Time to kick some ass and save some cash in 2018!
Hey caleb. Your black dragon blog shows the full article in rss feeds, while this one only shows an exerpt. Could you make this blog show full articles in rss too?
If you accept as fact that the US is mathematically certain to either default on its debt or be forced to inflate it away (which I do) then it actually makes sense to purposefully spend as much as possible in the interim on things that actually help the country (like infrastructure), and stick other countries dumb enough to lend to us with the bill.
This might not be ethical depending on ones morals, but it is logical. Whether Trump is doing this or not I don’t know, but he has made comments in the past that lead me to believe he has an awareness of the reality of the situation that other politicians don’t.
It makes more sense then maxing austerity when you are still going to go through the monetary/debt collapse anyway.
Wouldn’t the US defaulting on its debt cause a worldwide financial crisis?
Thanks for the motivation Caleb!
Caleb,
With the tax cuts in mind, what would you recommend – a C Corp, an S Corp, or an LLC? For LLCs, would a Single Member LLC count? How about for filing?
I recently just left the corporate world to start a business, and created an LLC. Just want to be sure I’m doing the right thing.
Correct. This all started with Bush, and the collapse began under Bush. Obama was just nails in the coffin. So is Trump. Read this.
Good idea. I’ll get my web guy on it.
I don’t see where I disagree. Only that it’s clearly unethical, and on a mass scale, not “might be.”
It would, but the crisis would be less bad if we had it now than if we had it 3 or 10 years from now. The longer we keep pushing this thing out, the worse it will be.
Major recessions are good for capitalism, and necessary. They clean out the incompetent and the corrupt. Never having a big recession rewards them.
You’re welcome!
Yes, but only with an S election, which makes your SM LLC pay taxes like an S corp, which is pass-through.
My general advice is to not bother with creating a corporate structure until your new business is making at least $1500 month, since creating a corporate structure costs money. But it’s up to you.
Generation Z (after millenials) seems to be more conservative
Correction. According to two surveys, generation Z is clearly left but not quite as left as the millennials, which doesn’t mean much. “Generation Z is conservative” is a right-wing myth. I have an article planned where I go through the data.
They’re actually every bit as bad as any other generation in that they still want the state to solve all their problems, which is a left wing philosophy at the core.
I’ve been saying that to my buddies for awhile, that Obombya and Tantrum Trump are just parroting Dubya’s policies etc. Presidents go through phases, usually there isn’t a significant change for like 28 or so years. Dubya’s “the state will take care of you, as long as you let us blow up whoever we want without question” era will probably end in 2028 or so. That’s when we’ll get a person who, like Comrade Bernie, will seem inviting enough but will be like an American version of Lenin. Then in the 2040s, we’ll get the American version of Stalin. THAT is when China will become the new US in terms of a world power, and when Millennial Americans, who will be in their 40s and 50s, will fly into a rage. Gen Z won’t stand for it, and the US will probably have a second revolutionary war.
I speculate about this kind of stuff for fun as all of you can see…lol
Unless technology in 10 years from now has advanced so much that the cost of living are much lower, as you say here:
https://calebjonesblog.com/technology-might-save-us/
I think advances in computation AI and medicine might get to the point where technology will solve most of humanity problems in a few decades. The elite just need to keep the entire system from collapsing until then. If you believe that, “pushing this thing out” may be the right move.
Risking the entire economy and the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people on a “might?”
I laughed out loud at the beginning with “this is great for me!!! but totally dooms the US”
that being said looking forward to starting my first business and getting free.
I think any speculation about GenZ is rather worthless till the oldest ones are 25+, which is soon but too many people have had strong opinions on them since as early as 2014.
I’m 26, and when I was 18, I was politically the opposite of what I currently am on at least 4 different fronts, probably more. My rate of ideological change has barely started to slow down. We need to see GenZ-ers vote and talk and do stuff for at least a few more years before we can confidently assess their politics compared to millennials or others.
That being said I do have *some* (small) hope that a number of PC beliefs are gonna start to lose the near unanimity they currently enjoy in some circles a few decades from now, progressively undermined by ever improving data-mining methods, machine learning, peer-reviewed science on nature-nurture, etc. Granted, first it’s gonna keep getting much worse and more and more States are gonna implement ever more invasive PC laws and regulations, but I think the whole thing may peak and start to decline in our lifetimes. At least in enough countries that it won’t be too hard to just move there and ignore the rest.
OTOH, it could also go very differently: the masses continue to be fed PC garbage for many, many decades, but the “class” of experts in the hard sciences become increasingly ghettoized from other domains and become ever more secretive about their real views, leading to a relationship between PC and science very similar to the relationship that existed between scientists and the church in the 18th-19th centuries, with many scientists doubting part or all of the tenets but staying in the closest and discreetly continuing their job without caring to disturb “priests” (ie PC drones) and common folk with facts they can’t handle.
Exactly. They do seem to be shedding the PC / safe space / 138 genders /kill whitey nonsense that currently infects college campuses and newsrooms, but they still look to govt force to solve problems. Unfortunately though that is human nature.
Those of us who feel otherwise are a rare breed historically speaking, and rendered even more rare from systematic culling by totalitarian regimes over the millennia
Hey Caleb, Good post and you makes sense. But have you considered this?
If tax cuts produce so much economic activity, couldn’t government actually have more money?
If we get huge increases in wealth, even with a lower tax bracket, the government could still end up collecting more money because there is so much.
I dislike big government, and I know ultimately no good comes from it(or them having more money)
Its also funny to see the left suddenly being VERY concerned with deficits. LOL
tbh that never bothered me. I mean before this, we had sex-negative tradcons saying that anyone who doesn’t agree with them was a degenerate heathen. Same action, different flavor. Even the kill whitey nonsense is a message that is constantly being sent by…white people! It’s the white man’s burden all over again lol. Time repeats itself no matter how much we think we have learned from it. Because no matter how much we think we have learned from it, there is always one small lesson we have overlooked, or one big convenience (sizing people up quickly to save time) that we refuse to sacrifice. To me there is no difference between the tradcon or the progressive. Both are collectivist, both root for the existential death of individuality.
It may have BECOME human nature, but it certainly was not back in the day.
Yes. Under Bush, net tax receipts to the government actually went up under his tax cuts. The problem is they went up by a little and he increased spending by a lot, so it didn’t help. Trump and the Reupblicans will do the same; they will skyrocket spending far higher than any bump in income they receive because of tax cuts. Trump is a big-government guy.
The party out of power is always the one to bitch about deficits. The left when the right is in power, the right when the left is in power. That’s why they’re both full of shit.
yes it was, humans have always been this way. As a species humans crave security, and various kinds of pleasures, but they don’t as a group crave freedom; especially when it comes at a cost.
Whether its a cromagnon tribe, or a modern government, people reliably choose security and ‘prosperity’ over freedom. Every time.
If the average human was willing to sacrifice short term pleasure and security for freedom governments as we know them would never even exist.
Hey Caleb,
Speaking of tax cuts, I recall that you’re in favor of a flat tax rate, like Hong Kong’s.
But then what’s your response to left wingers who claim that a flat tax helps the rich and hurts the poor?
No. I’m against a flat tax because it’s an income tax and I think there should be no income tax at all. But a flat tax is slightly less horrible than our current system.
Have them look up the Fair Tax, which is a flat tax but regular expenses (such as groceries) are exempted and people get a refund every year to pay for that stuff.
Again though, the answer is to have no income taxes of any kind, at all, for anyone. That would really help the poor.