I really want tax reform to hit this year. But can you really do tax reform without first understanding the impact of healthcare reform? So in a way I get it but if I had to pick one, I would go with tax reform.

I hear tax reform is easy. Throw away the book and just make it the same across the board.

Tax reform is way more difficult than it may appear. Inherently, reform means raising some taxes to cut other taxes, and nobody is going to willingly be the one that has their taxes raised. The border adjustment tax is already being hammered by retailers and the Kochs.

It probably wouldn't be hard to pass a simple rate reduction, but that isn't going to help Trump politically. It's really difficult to figure out a tax reform package that can pass and will be broadly popular.

Not to mention problems with the Byrd rule in the senate that will almost certainly give the bill a ten year expiration date.

I don't see a good way forward for him on health care. It seems that any bill that would please the freedom caucus is going to have to get rid of the pre-existing conditions guarantee and there's no way that's going to be palatable to the general public (and thus moderate Republicans).

I'm sure tax reform will be just as easy as health care reform was...

I guess NATO is not obsolete anymore (or at least until you are not standing next to the Secretary-General of NATO)

Trump reverses on NATO: ‘It’s no longer obsolete’ - POLITICO

Oh and China is not a currency manipulator as he promised he would proclaim on Day 1.

TBF there is some agreement where countries will spend 2% of GDP by x date. Apparently there are many that spend below that. So he did accomplish something

Where x I believe is 2020(maybe 25) and where the agreement is not something he put in place, it was there already. He just said a lot of stupid that contradicted it.

So no. He didn't accomplish anything but say silly uninformed things while confusing both our allies and enemies on what America's stance is on any given day. We are the joke of the world.

I guess this is good? From the Wall Street Journal.

Seems to think everything is easy until someone talks to him for ten minutes telling him it's not.

Fortunately I don't link my ego to how the world views my country. Maybe you should try that?

It's not nearly as complex as it's been devolved into.

Flat. Period.

Anything else is wrong, period.

It's not an ego thing. It's a geopolitical thing. As much as these nationalist idiots think focusing on America and ignoring everything outside the borders is the right move, that's not how the world works.

And now lets return to the real world

I'm there, come on over, there's room.

You can't drag around dead weight forever without it taking a toll, that's cold hard reality. Sooner or later, it's more than than the dwindling number of productives can carry.

It's time for that to be corrected. Period.

How utterly Christian of you (shakes head)

I missed that the hiring freeze has been revoked.

Best 13 weeks ever!

Plus, the german secretary of state among others has gone on record saying that such a agreement to definitely reach 2% does not exist but more a agreement to try and see if it isn't possible to get there. In a nice little quote : "I would not even know where to put all the aircraft-carriers we would need to build in order to spent that amount of money"

I kinda fail to see how hardware or manpower in terms of a massive army is going to make a lick of difference against the kind of threat "we" have to deal with.

So then you feel the same way about SS tax as well, taxing all revenue not just your first $xx. Flat, period?

You can throw "How Christian of you around", but at what point do we all start suffering? Is that Christian? We all suffer in this world?

You do know that there a a lot of people out there scamming the system, right?
I can tell you lots of stories of people that are lazy scamming the country for disability. Those are the drain on the system.
Also, government naturally expands if you dont keep it in check. And that begins to drain the system.

Im all for helping people. But let us not bring Christianity into it. We are a society of takers. And the amount of takers are starting to tip the balance.

The rich have never controlled a greater proportion of the national wealth or the national income. In what way is the balance tipping?

There's also widespread people on Wallstreet scamming the system and they have a much, much more significant impact on our economy. Why are we focused on a very small percentage of people that have almost no impact as opposed to those that are truly hurting things?

Because they're black/hispanic/other. Why do we keep pretending that's not the reason why people don't like the "freeloaders?"

Christian charity doesn't apply to something taken by force.

"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's"

I think some of you could stand to take 5 minutes out of your day and head to your local community health clinic for the under/uninsured. Maybe give some of the 20+ folks constantly waiting for services every hour of every day equal time versus the evil system-scammers, whose general existence you've only seen on paper?

I've been forced into those places once or twice, and I can tell you with complete confidence that nobody is happy to be there. Lost somewhere in the discussion between liberal coddling and conservative bootstrapping is the fact that simply being part of the institutionalized poor is hard and depressing work.

As bad as community clinics can be, try spending an hour in the waiting room at your local DHS Family Services. Imagine DMV with 1000% more bawling children and mentally ill. Ever walked past a half-way house, and taken a good long look at the lobby? If you're on any kind of 'assistance' these are the kind of places where you spend countless hours of your day, which the general public doesn't have to account for in the course of their lives. These places are without fail, over-packed, dingy and grey, and filled with the slowest most uncaring workers the government could find. To collect that assistance you'll need to spend tens of hours of every week in places like that, and if you've got issues with drug use or a criminal past, you can double or triple those hours.

The conservative nightmare of massive gangs of welfare deadbeats who enjoy frivolous lives siphoned off of public generosity ignores just how much hard work it takes to be part of the assisted-poor, while the liberals are content to ignore how much of those welfare resources are spent doing absolutely nothing of consequence. Frankly, If you haven't spent any time being part of the 'assisted' poor in modern America, then I don't think you have even the slightest bearing on which to judge those folks.

Not interested in judging them.

VERY interested in judging control of how my money is taken from me & redistributed.

Horseshit.

If you think I have any more interest in having money taken out of my pocket for a white guy/gal then you're horribly mistaken.

I guess we should start prepping now ...

If Trump does this, I don't think a small strike will do much other than piss off the crazy kid and escalate it even more. Beats me how China will react.

U.S. May Launch Strike If North Korea Reaches For Nuclear Trigger - NBC News

Have you refused any & all government benefits (including tax credits & financial aid for college) for your child & his care in the past, or is this the kind of core passion that extends only to other folks' benefits and/or your money?

My brother in law is as white as they come.

So are we about to bomb North Korea?

Is this going to be an every other weekend type thing for Trump? In a way, I'm okay with this, the president deserves as much relaxation as possible but just seems bad optics to me.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/14/politi...ago/index.html

If so, RIP Seoul

I hear the chocolate cake is too good to go a fortnight without.

At least Samsung would randomly stop making things explode.

And given the Presidential situation over there, its probably the worst time for the US to do anything in the area, while still the best time for NK to mess around.

For as many times as Trump has said he's learned something, or he didn't know how hard something is, I don't think its the best time to go around trying to bomb places that at least have the possibility of already having nukes.

I can't answer the tax credit question since I didn't do the form, no clue what was/wasn't filed. I stay as far away from that crap as possible to try to manage my blood pressure.

And no, not a dime in governmental financial aid for college (and certainly none prior to that), private funds or private scholarships has paid that (unless you want to count the state of MS contributions to the university's electrical bills I guess).

I don't consider it your responsibility to send my child to school any more than I consider sending yours to be mine.

Any more fucking questions?

edit to add: And if they'll flatten the tax rate to what's fair, I'd gladly waive any & all deductions, credits, or whatever other mumbo jumbo you want to add to the list. I haven't done the personal math on that because I don't care what it comes out to ... it's about what's right. Period.

some questions....

1. Do we believe that they have missiles accurate enough to even hit Seoul?
2. If they did it with bombers, wouldn't we have fighters/AA ready to intercept?
3. If you blew up a plane with a nuke on it, does the nuke blow up?

Except that he and his cronies screamed incessantly when Obama did it occasionally. Every other tweet was about Obama golfing and Obama vacations. I read something the other day about the cost, on this pace Trump will spend more federal dollars in 1 year than Obama did in 8 on vacations and golf. That does not include the $400k/day they are spending on their kid in NY. But hey, let's complain about food stamps.

I don't think we're just talking missiles/bombing here, they have an army of 6 million highly trained folks (even if the technology is probably shit) vs 500k in the South. Unless we're shipping the entirity of the US Army over there or getting serious support from other nations isn't there a serious danger they'd be in Seoul in weeks just in terms of conventional warfare alone?

I assumed "RIP Seoul" was a reference to them nuking it, not taking it via invasion.

I was referencing all of the artillery NK has trained on Seoul.

NK has artillery that can reach Seoul.

edit: Dammit, Cartman.

Theoretically possible (I think) but actually unlikely (I think).

A conventional explosion from, say, shooting down the aircraft would lack the precision needed for detonation.

There would have to be a deadman switch on the nuke to have it explode if a plane was shot down. External impacts wouldn't set one off. In any event, I don't think NK has made a nuke small enough to fit onto a plane.

If we're actually talking about action against NK I would hope it would be a surgical strike to remove the Kim's and take the head off the military command but that's got to be hugely shaky in terms of legality and what do you do with the regime change after that and the billions that will have to be spent bringing a large country out of the dark ages.

Anything short of that, yeesh. Unless it's with a commitment from China that they will actively support any action taken, we are talking about casualties unheard of since WW2 in terms of the damage they will do to the South and the number of US servicemen that are going to be needed to stop them.

Not saying doing nothing is the right action here either, but there's no doubt in my mind if the US just does a couple strikes to try and set the nuke program back 5 years they are going to do something really really stupid.

Though If anyone was batshit crazy enough to have a deadman switch on a nuke like that it would be North Korea.

I hope Trump & Co has thought thru this several steps ahead and wargame it vs Trump shooting from the hip.

It seems that Trump has pretty much committed to a red line which the crazy kid will probably cross this weekend. If so, there will be some sort of US response (because its a red line and Trump doesn't want it to come back to him ala Obama/Syria).

I think any military response we do (small, med, big), the crazy kid (who probably has a very deep bunker) can interpret it as an act of war. There are alot of civilians and US troops in the line of fire.

There are no good options now but once the crazy kid gets intercontinental nukes there will really be no good options then, so it might be better to resolve this once and for now in the next 4 years.

I don't have much faith in this, with tons of evidence pointing to him making a decision based on the last person to talk to him. I mean, look at what he said after talking to the Chinese leader about North Korea: “After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy”

Donald Trump admits Xi Jinping gave him a history lesson on North Korea | The Independent