Terry, I ain't even one of the jackoffs who deliberately ping you to get a rise. I was sincerely trying to engage you in good faith, but fuck me for being an optimist I guess. I'll still try to engage in good faith with your retort, but I'm not expecting you to return the favour.
It only lasts through 2028 and only up to $12.5k.
You're acting like that isn't a genuinely beneficial provision, even within the constraints it operates under as of today's passage. Build Back Better had no such provision, and I surely would've welcomed it into Biden's BBB the same way I welcomed the CHIPS Act's passage (i.e. the one bit of administrative continuity between Trump 1.0 and Biden that I could genuinely respect). Even if it goes tits-up by 2028, I'd still be grateful for some modicum of reprieve from OT taxation. I'd even wager that the GOP's passage of no tax on tips+overtime gives them a valuable bit of leverage come midterms and 2028's election season. Democrats had all the time, leverage, and political power at their disposal to codify such a minuscule change, yet they did not do so. GOP didn't do so either until Trump twisted their balls to include it. However minor of a victory it may be, I'll take it.
And don't worry, the money printing that will be needed to pay for this bill will make those tax savings meaningless with the added inflation. Then I'm gonna laugh at you for whining about inflation (well, you won't whine about it until Dear Leader is no longer president because you could never criticize your waifu).
You're missing out on a crucial detail here: Powell damn sure ain't lowering interest rates no matter how much Trump tries to influence the Fed. This is also coinciding with a
270% increase in US Customs' coffers. This isn't some empty conjecture that the lugenpresse is perpetuating to delude me into a false sense of comfort, either. I
have spoken
at length before about the impact Trump's tariffs are having as someone who
works in 3PL and witnessed the lunacy firsthand. I'm not foolhardy enough to expect tariffs to plug up entire revenue shortfalls, but an empirically proven 270%
gain in US Customs revenue is no small feat. There certainly are unforeseen stresses, consequences, and volatility to be sure; I won't ever deny that. Even so, tariffs are proving themselves (at this point) to be a viable revenue stream for the US federal government that come from
commercial coffers during the business cycle and
not from personal and professional coffers once the fiscal year is over.
Here's a little fact in Economics 101 that tends to get glossed over, but still remains vitally important: consistently high trade deficits
also necessitate a consistent
outflow of capital from country A who does the importing to country B who does the exporting. Even if the US dollar remains the dominant reserve currency because of its ubiquity, those US dollars still have to get printed by the Fed. That's why our US dollar's purchasing power is so fucking terrible domestically despite 50+ years of post-Brenton Woods, post-Nixon international hegemony. Tariffs ultimately mean that US dollars that foreign exporters have
return to the USA instead of circulating literally everywhere else
but America.
As to supply chain-induced inflation, I would like to nuance the discussion by pointing out that some importers are disproportionately impacted than others. A mom and pop pizzeria who imports San Marzano tomatoes from Italy for their marinara sauce
will feel the pain of broad-strokes tariffs and pass it onto their consumers; that's simply unavoidable. For every small business impacted by tariffs, there are dozens more medium-to-large enterprises, even conglomerates, with hundreds of thousands, if not millions or even billions of dollars in liquidity who'll have to grit their teeth and accept the 10% duty on business-to-business transactions that don't immediately trickle down to consumers. You would only realise this if you're willing to accept that business-to-business transactions are
far more commonplace in international logistics than business-to-consumer like it is here in the American domestic market.
Oh no, Casio has to eat a $100,000 duty on a $1,000,000 bulk shipment of G-Shock watches coming into America from Bangkok! Merck has to pay $250,000 in duties on a $2,500,000 shipment of scientific analysis instruments coming from Japan, destined for one of their research laboratories in New England! Oh, the inhumanity! I'm deliberately being facetious here, but I pray you understand the point I'm trying to articulate.
They should, instead, pass smaller bills. I know you're not very smart but you do know they made it one big bill so they could throw unpopular shit in there that fucks you over, right?
Once again, Terry: I'm legitimately trying to engage without hostility or malice toward you. I might be an uneducated hick from the rolling hills of Appalachia, but it doesn't take a genius to realise that "hey, our constituencies really want no tax on tips and no tax on overtime. This has broad, bipartisan support. Let's draft it up into legislation and pass it!" is
more than possible. When the Supreme Court overturned the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in 2022,
both Democrats and Republicans got the fuck off their asses and passed the Respect for Marriage Act, signed by Joe Biden, precisely because neither Democrats
nor Republicans wanted to alienate LGB voters. You can't even tell me that's just a fluke or a relic of 90s-era bipartisanship; that shit literally happened like 2-3 years ago.
