This triggered the sort of low-rent political thread we don't want here. Please don't do that.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15862439 and marked it well off-topic.

I thought everyone was very respectful.

It's way off topic.

Yes, it is. Thanks for your moderation.

I am generally in favor of a smaller national government and my default position on a tax cut is positive until proven otherwise, yet I still understand how progressive tax structures work. I have many friends and associates who would be considered conservative even among other Republicans, and probably have inconceivably conservative viewpoints by most of HN's standards. And I don't think any of them would spend $150k just to keep $30k out of the government's hands. So yes I think if you're going to hurt yourself financially to make some token gesture toward the government that won't even show up on a budget spreadsheet because it's so small, that's either an extreme ideological viewpoint or you don't know how taxes work. "Never ascribe to malice" and all that.

And individual taxes aside, corporate taxes should absolutely be lower, they're among the highest in the world.

> corporate taxes should absolutely be lower, they're among the highest in the world.

Effective Rate

So lets say Corporate Tax is a 20% flat tax from 35% the taxes would actually increase. Because they are actually paid at around 15% and no where close to highest in the world. We are actually on par or bellow the average tax rate across the world. https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2017/04/24/trumps-c...

Personally I would love to see a drop of corporate federal taxes and place them more on the individuals. Tax the shareholder and those that profit from the corporations. The truth is this isn't happening and why we see the money continually going to the top and not filtering down. Corporations are incentivized to lower wages and benefits to extract more profit. As the economic disparity continues to climb and the burden is placed on the middle and lower class to support profit growth. Looking at taxes for the national safety net for the working poor, higher utilities bills, and higher medical expenses and insurance cost. None of these are of concern for the wealthy.

We can't even have a conversation on what is fair for the working poor and instead we disincentive work in America. The "conservatives" today are just totally Libertarians who could careless if work is incentivized.

I've always thought of "trickle down economics" as an overly-rosy way of saying that we'll "grow our way out of the hole". Nevermind the 'conservatives' will never stop digging, will never cut spending, even occasionally spinning up another entitlement of their own, and only occasionally toss their people a bone by slowing existing programs' growth rate.

I don't think Reagan thought of government size as being a problem since he grew it massively. I think he did rebel against bureaucracies and waste/fraud/abuse, at least rhetorically. Ultimately, the guy was a deal-maker, and he'd happily grow the government (with military at the forefront) if he could get his stimulative tax cuts.

> Though I love throwing Reagan into the face of today's "Conservatives" they really would HATE Reagan today and his liberal ways.

He was as liberal as JFK was, which is to say Reagan was your classic "govt can do some good here"-liberal. Today's true "liberals" are cultural marxists, which ultimately makes them toxic, hence their precipitous decline recently. If the libs could drop the culture war stuff and focus on labor issues and positive right-sized governing, they'd shoot back to popularity. Nothing will improve while power comes chiefly from dividing people and the hatred continues to flow.

Reagan was a moral man and he was a good orator, making him a fine spokesman for America and raising our stock worldwide. That he could reassure and comfort people was the best part about him; the rest of Reagan was muddled goods and bads.

But Hillary wasn't a liberal. Liberals actually hated her. We are now in the world perception of Democrat = Liberal and Republican = Conservative and its just wrong. I grew up being a Republican and I don't think I have changed much in my political stances but everyone else has moved far to the Libertarian doctrine.

Case in point: Increase the wages and benefits = less government funding. Never going to get backing from Republican Party in its present form. So instead we have this Corporation Welfare system where tax dollars for Walmart's benefits.

Hillary Clinton presented, by not a small margin, the most left-leaning platform any major-party Presidential candidate has ever put forth. Modulo foreign policy, the daylight between her campaign and the Sanders campaign was pretty narrow.

I don't know where this "Hillary Clinton isn't liberal" thing comes from, but it is demonstrably untrue.

> But Hillary wasn't a liberal.

I don't know why you're bringing her up. You're using the term 'liberal', but I haven't got a clue what people mean when they say that anymore. What's your definition?

You say what Hillary is not, but you don't say what she is. I don't separate her in any way from the Democrats politically - at least those who hold power currently - not the rank-and-file of course.

> We are now in the world perception of Democrat = Liberal and Republican = Conservative and its just wrong.

I disagree, you're just assuming everyone's stuck in old tribal thinking when there's so much evidence to the contrary. Haven't you noticed the tectonic shifts in media over the last 5 years? The boomers are starting to die off, their power is waning, and the younger generations are restless. #metoo works because the majority is disgusted by what they see. Look at how many congress-rats are jumping ship at the end of this cycle.

The Republican party is dying for abandoning their base in order to cling to power, despite their fundraising. The Democrats are losing seats everywhere, have not been grooming enough replacements for the old-timers, and won't shake the loser 60's radical ideology - they might as well just die too.

> Case in point: Increase the wages and benefits = less government funding.

Why would you believe that taxes are a zero-sum game? Not that it always works out this way, because the economy has cycles, but you can stimulate economic activity by taxing less which does create growth that yields net increases in tax revenue.

Ask yourself, could your "tax more == more revenue" mental model be too simplistic? Who put that assumption in your head, and why is that idea so powerful for them when you accept it? (My theory is: a human tendency to treat the top of one's conceptual hierarchy as god/religion and the desire to sacrifice to the gods. If government is at the top of your hierarchy, certainly taxes are a worthy sacrifice to the good!)

I'll posit a related question; I don't know the answer because I'm not an economist, but I think it's a good one nonetheless: is there a scientifically/statistically optimal tax rate that we could tweak once a year based on forecasts and trends? Why have we not done this already if maximizing revenue is the goal? I go so far as to claim that for most people on the left (radical or not), maximizing tax revenue is never the goal, just a standard talking point when discussing tax cuts.

> Democrats are losing seats everywhere, have not been grooming enough replacements for the old-timers, and won't shake the loser 60's radical ideology

Uh, the Democrats never, as a national party, had a “60s radical ideology”, and since the 1990s have been a solidly pro-big-business center-right neoliberal party barely distinguishable from late 1980s Republicans but for some equal rights stands; that's weakened a bit in the last few years, and may have hit a tipping point after the 2016 election, though its kind of hard to tell for sure with the Dems lacking any of the national power centers.

Black Lives Matter seems very throwback racial politics to me. Is that a DNC thing, specifically? No, but clearly there's an embrace of the movement in order to secure their votes and energy. So yes, as a national party, democrats are all about griping for oppressed minority groups.

60's radical ideology is what I understand stems from the Marxist shift from class struggle to oppressed identity groups in the 60's as a means of staying relevant. Here's a discussion about this phenomena on Wikipedia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left

This is cultural Marxism. This brand of politics is pessimistic, negative, divisive and wicked by nature. It foments discontent. And notice that it only seeks to lift the oppressed minorities up by bringing the oppressive majority down! Sounds like typical democrat rhetoric to me.

60's boomers' clock is ticking, the radical ideas just fading away to obscurity now... Time for some fresh thinking on the left.

> This is cultural Marxism.

No, it's actually Marxism losing relevance in favor of something radically different, but in any case it's fairly irrelevant to the Democratic Party which never generally adopted a ”New Left” position, following classical moderate, non-Marxist pro-labor focus into the 80s, then abandoning that and anything like the Left generally for the center-right neoliberalism of Clinton's “Third Way”.

Bill Clinton was a centrist, and that's part of why I think he was so popular as president.

I had not considered what you say as a possibility. I always thought the Marxists were the real power in the Democratic party and they implemented their policies slowly and incrementally.

Does neoliberalism really hold sway in the Democratic party and what I considered incremental marxism was really just left-of-center Clintonian politics? How does the constant ratcheting up of identity politics stuff fit in to your theory, though? It seems integral to Democratic power and is ideologically not Clintonian.

> I always thought the Marxists were the real power in the Democratic party

The most powerful faction in the Democratic Party are center-right neoliberals like the Clintons, the next most powerful are center-left Social Democrats (including what passes in the US, but not really by international standards, for “Democratic Socialists”.) There are essentially no Marxists in influential roles in the Party. There's probably a few Marxists (or Leninists/Stalinist/Maoists) in the electorate that hold their nose and vote for Democrats as, from their perspective, the very slightly lesser of two evils (and probably some who vote for Republicans as the greater evil in hopes of provoking revolution), but they aren't really driving the party, either by having their hands on levers of power or being an actively courted constituency.

> Does neoliberalism really hold sway in the Democratic party and what I considered incremental marxism was really just left-of-center Clintonian politics?

The first, yes, the second...well, insofar as it is not Marxist, sure.

> How does the constant ratcheting up of identity politics stuff fit in to your theory, though?

While there are Left forms of identity politics, other-than-proletarian-identity politics are not Marxist even when they are somewhere on the Left, though the practitioners (even among right-wing identity politics) may draw something from Marxist (or Leninist) tactics or analytical modes (Marx's adaptation of Hegelian dialectic is widely influential in this way), but this doesn't make the movements involved politically Marxist.

And while the Democratic Party does include some who pursue Left forms of identity politics, it predominantly pursued bourgeois feminism and the similar bourgeois versions of other group-rights movements, rather than any of the Left (for instance, radical, socialist, or Marxist) versions.

While to anti-feminists (etc.) the distinction may seem irrelevant, it's actually quite critical to leftists of all stripes.

Bourgeois identity politics (and the fairly overt rejection of Left identity politics) is a fairly key part of Clintonian Third Wayism.

> The most powerful faction in the Democratic Party are center-right neoliberals like the Clintons, the next most powerful are center-left Social Democrats (including what passes in the US, but not really by international standards, for “Democratic Socialists”.)

My gut tells me your assessment is wrong - that the Clintonian Third Wayism you describe is waning - chiefly evidenced by Obama being so much further to the left and comparatively weak/confused on foreign policy as compared with the Clintons. Maybe I place too much weight on the presidency and not enough on Congress. I admit to being largely ignorant about how center-right or left-leaning the congressional Democrat's policy positions actually are.

> it predominantly pursued bourgeois feminism and the similar bourgeois versions of other group-rights movements, rather than any of the Left (for instance, radical, socialist, or Marxist) versions.

That the Democratic Party embraces identity politics was my impression as well. I can see by your explanation how that doesn't require marxist tendencies to work. I still don't agree with dividing people into groups and pitting them against one another, though. But at least I see the differences in motive, so thanks for explaining that.

> Bourgeois identity politics (and the fairly overt rejection of Left identity politics) is a fairly key part of Clintonian Third Wayism.

I can see that as well, which was my confusion! I wish the Clintons were better people, there's a lot to like about their philosophy in the abstract.

> My gut tells me your assessment is wrong - that the Clintonian Third Wayism you describe is waning - chiefly evidenced by Obama being so much further to the left and comparatively weak/confused on foreign policy as compared with the Clintons.

It is waning, as evidenced by how competitive Sanders was in the primary and how popular Sanders remains, though the neoliberal faction is still dominant; but Obama wasn't significantly further to the left than Clinton (not was his administration nearly as weak and fumbling on substantive foreign policy as the Clinton administration, not that that, in either direction, says anything about the dominance of Third Wayism.)

> That the Democratic Party embraces identity politics was my impression as well.

So, incidentally, has the Republican Party for a long time. Christian identity politics, obviously for quite a long time, but also since the Southern Strategy White identity politics (with a sharp uptick recently in n how overt and direct their appeals on both are.)

Are you perhaps looking for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve ?

> I disagree, you're just assuming everyone's stuck in old tribal thinking when there's so much evidence to the contrary.

I wish you were correct but what evidence? Facebook and the Internet has increased Tribalism to Yellow Journalism levels. We have Breitbart and MSNBC. People mostly just read news and opinions that they agree with and don't listen to the other side.

http://fortune.com/2017/01/13/fake-news-tribalism/

> The Republican party is dying for abandoning their base in order to cling to power, despite their fundraising. The Democrats are losing seats everywhere, have not been grooming enough replacements for the old-timers, and won't shake the loser 60's radical ideology - they might as well just die too.

Um not certain what your point is but the issue is the Gerrymandering and electoral college. This is the second president this century to win with a minority of votes. The issue is the unfair way voters votes are manipulated in states, i.e. Wisconsin. https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/5-things-know-about-wisco...

> could your "tax more == more revenue" mental model be too simplistic?

Wait what? If you mean that if working poor made more money they would need less benifits????

> I don't know the answer because I'm not an economist, but I think it's a good one nonetheless:

Your asking a political science question. Economist don't get to say what our tax rates are but our politicians and there isn't one economist in the bunch. Here is one article for you https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21731166-house-republ...

Actually both Hillary and Obama are one nation Tories ie centre right only Bernie might be considered left wing but would be considered a Blarite by hard line leftists.