Trump's new tariff proposals include a 25% tax on video game consoles

[Mr Puggsly]

SpokenTruth said:

Mr Puggsly said:

Agreed, he does do plenty of stuff worth attacking. But I guess its not juicy enough, so we waste time with Russia.

Anybody know how much is actually being spent on subsidies? People always say they hate them, but how much is it really. I suspect its not really that much in the grand scheme but I could be wrong. Based on the figures I see, we spend significantly more making people fat with food stamps.

Just out of curiosity, I did a search Bing search on, "Obama tarrifs." I wouldn't say that democrat was opposed to tariffs.

I wasn't suggesting dems want high taxes for nothing per se. They want to crush the private sector in many cases, throw MORE money at things with little results, etc. I mean education for example, we spend more money educating children than almost any other country with little to show for it. Many of our social services just seem to make people lazy and fatter, that's most prevalent among groups who take advantage of these entitlements. For what its worth, I think there are better ways to dole out social services/welfare but our government is just terrible at it. The solution isn't throw more money at bad programs and bad spending.

You're not going to like these numbers.

$32 billion for the Farm Market Facilitation Program on a market that only has a $63 billion in annual income to start with.  This is on top of the $20 billion in farm subsidies that are given every year anyway.

Overall corporate subsidies has reached over $110 billion per year.  And this is almost entirely to corporations that do not need the subsidies.  It also runs counter to the notion of free market enterprise.  If a company needed a subsidy to exist, then the market dictated that it didn't need to exist as a company.

Budget for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Food stamps) - $65.352 billion (pdf).

The farm subsidies have certainly increased given current events, but I'm still somewhat indifferent.

When I read about how companies avoid paying taxes you learn its not really as sinister as it might seem. I get the same impression with subsidies, its more like tax breaks/incentives. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems the companies that often get these big subsidies are also paying significantly more in taxes.

It makes me think of the Amazon HQ in New York situation. Some of the more pragmatic democrats were happy to give $3B in tax breaks because it was supposed to generate $27+ billion in tax revenue. Suddenly tax breaks for a big company wasn't a bad thing, it was just business. Then it fell apart, NY suddenly has a budget crisis and is partly blamed on Trump because reasons.