billsfan89

Unless I am mistaken, I thought you said i(n response to another poster) that a national sales tax would be able to fully fund our current levels of government. I don't think it would since while the current tax code has all sorts of exemptions for rich people to take advantage of it still taxes them on some of their income (Even Mitt Romney paid about 12.5% of his capital gains income.) So my argument is that a national sales tax would not be able to replace the revenue lost from payroll taxes, corporate taxes, and personal income taxes. You said that it would be to another poster and my claim was that it simply wouldn't as the numbers don't add up.

Mahomes would not be Mahomes without his supporting cast, maybe he would still be a dam fine QB but his insane levels of production were made possible by both his abilities, supporting cast, and coaching staff.

The more I look at it there isn't an offensive linemen on the board that wouldn't be a reach. I would rather take a pass rusher and address O-line in round 2. WR might have to be an overspend in free agency but unless a trade down presents its self I think it is more than likely the team won't get good value on offense at pick number 9.

TNA had two problems, they didn't have the management in place and their vision was grander than it should have been. TNA should have been happy being a viable number two promotion in North America at least for a period of time. You need to have good management in place in order to scale up. If you try to scale up with bad management you end up losing a lot of money. TNA had a profitable run from 2007-2008 where they were a nice alternative product at a time when WWE wasn't doing much. Yet After failing to take a big step up in 2009 they went and spent tons of money on a product that wasn't ready. AEW should strive to be a solid number 2 wrestling promotion for 3-5 years. Find a decent TV deal within 1 year (man would I love to see TNT or even another Turner network like Tru TV give them a solid deal) and then just spend a few years building a new and interesting product/brand. I hope AEW puts in place good management and understands that for them it is going to take a long drawn out process to make them a viable brand. They have some good talent secured but its not always about the talent (TNA at one point in my opinion had a better roster than WWE.) AEW hopefully will learn to walk before it can run and soon once Impact folds, ROH relegates its self back to being a hybrid indy, that will leave AEW as the primary wrestling company alternative. To be fair that was the idea with the Invasion angle. They wanted to turn Smackdown in WCW Nitro but UPN wouldn't let them unless they cut the show to an hour (Thus cutting their revenue in half.) It was UPN's reluctance to have WCW branded programming that made them change course. That being said I am not sure how well they could have pulled it off, no matter what people would still know it was the same company.

I have been an on and off again wrestling fan since my childhood, right now I just check out the big shows from WWE but man does wrestling need something new to happen. It seems like the last big stars they created were John Cena, Batista, and Brock Lesnar. Even those three lacked the true crossover power of a Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock (And to a lesser extent Goldberg.) I hope that Khan a deep pocketed billionaire who much like Ted Turner has a passion for the industry is able to both put the money into the company and get the right people in charge. TNA for a window of time was throwing out the money but they didn't have the right management. ROH had some decent people in place with some solid talent but their owners never had the money. It just seems like AEW could be just what is needed to actually push wrestling in a new direction.

I understand how sales tax works, its not a hard concept. I am arguing that there is no way in hell a national sales tax would raise anything near what our current progressive tax system currently raises. If someone makes a million dollars a year, under the current system even if you want to be generous with deductions they probably still pay 200-250k in taxes not including payroll taxes. Under a national sales tax that person making 1,000,000 a year would have to spend all 1,000,000 on taxable reported goods to contribute 250k in taxes. They would have to spend 800k on taxable reported goods to pay 200k in taxes. Almost any high earner gets a really good tax break via a national sales tax. Are you arguing that a national sales tax would rake in enough money to replace the current income tax, capital gains taxes, payroll taxes, and smaller assorted taxes that currently take in 3.4 trillion dollars? My argument is it wouldn't. Now your argument could be that you would rather just do the sales tax and make due with the money it produces but that would then require deep deep cuts to all aspects of government.

You have to talk in larger numbers when talking about full scale economic policy as opposed to stating that because one person or a set of people cheat taxes means another system would work better when the numbers simply don't add up. Also the solution to our tax laws are not well enforced because of corruption shouldn't be to completely eliminate the IRS and switch to a tax system that will result in less revenue. Maybe we should go after the corrupting money influence in politics and make sure that we best enforce the tax laws we have so that we have more money for things like infrastructure and science? The current progressive tax system raises about 3.4 trillion in federal dollars. That's the amount you would have to hope a national sales tax would raise minus the 150 billion you give people via a yearly rebate to cover their first 20k. I don't see the numbers working. I am willing to be proven wrong if you have evidence to back it up but right now it just doesn't seem convincing that a rebate backed sales tax would fund the government at current levels. I am a numbers guy, I try my best to be objective, if you have projections and estimates that say otherwise I would hear it out. I also am genuinely asking how would a sales tax eliminate the IRS? Don't you still need to enforce people paying the sales tax?

People work under the books in a income tax economy too. In any tax system you will find people skirting the system. The point should be hard numbers that rich people would get a big fat windfall of money only paying about 25% on less than 50% of what they spend (Assuming they don't try and skim on certain purchases) as opposed to being taxed on all the reported income they make. Overall it becomes a rather easy issue to illustrate that flat or fair tax is basically wanting poor people and middle class people to pay more or the same in taxes but have programs that invest in them and the nation overall (social safety net and other public programs) in order to give a huge windfall to the wealthy who already are doing insanely well. When Warren Buffett states that we coddle the rich in this country you know the problem with the economy isn't that the rich don't have enough money.

The current top rate is 37% on income over 500k. I rounded that down to 30% to adjust for deductions and income falling in other brackets. Even if you rounded that effective total rate (which I am doing for simplicity sake) to 25% just to overestimate deductions that person earning a million would still pay 250k in taxes. On a national sales tax of 25% you would have to hope that person earning one million spends all of their money on taxable goods in a single year to get to that amount and that's not even factoring in payroll taxes. I just see no way that a national sales tax earns more money than the current progressive tax system.

If lowering taxes on wealthy people dramatically in the interest of fairness meant drastically slashing military spending, programs that invest in science, getting rid of social security and medicare (no IRS means no payroll taxes,) destroying regulatory agencies, lowering education investment, lowering infrastructure spending, killing the NASA budget, and mostly eliminating programs that help the poor and working poor you would see people clamoring for a progressive tax system again. You have to be extremely wealthy or a sucker to think that people are that desperate for lower and more fair taxes on the wealthy to destroy all those things. I know this board is very conservative in general and basically adheres to a rather Ron Swanson like ideology. But if you actually looked at what your tax dollars get spent on you find that Americans get a decent deal. 61% of federal spending is on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, all very popular programs. Of the other 39% the largest item is military spending which is about 16% of the federal budget. Which means that the rest of the federal budget including servicing the debt (which is about 6% of federal spending) is only about 23% of the total federal budget. That includes very popular things like National Parks, Science and Educational programs, research grants, NASA, housing programs, food stamps, Infrastructure spending, Environmental protection, other regulatory agencies, and the post office. I get that there is wasted money and bloat in the federal government but to act like there isn't waste in other big private sector agencies would be dishonest. Any large entity has waste and fraud. Overall I think that the American people would rather keep the current progressive tax system than to completely dismantle and the services that the government provides.

How does it not make any sense? If you switched federal income taxes to a national sales tax that doesn't eliminate state and local taxes. Federal dollars vs. Federal dollars is what you have to look at. If you make 1,000,000 in income and are taxed at a federal rate of 30% after deductions and the money that falls into a lower bracket that means you are paying about 300,000$ in taxes right? 30% of 1,000,000 is 300,000 and that's not factoring in payroll taxes. If you went to a national sales tax to replace federal income taxes and the rate was 25% a person earning 1,000,000 spending all of their money on taxable reported goods would still only pay 250,000 in taxes. Where is the math faulty? The debate is what raises more money.

I don't think he is worth the money he is currently on the books for. If he was a good but overpaid player a team with a less dire cap situation could afford to keep him. But teams up against the cap can't afford to pass on massive cap savings to keep a player that isn't worth the money.

They are -7 million in the hole to start, Bortles doesn't save much money, Dareus is not enough, and they don't have any other big cuts that would net 10+ million in cap savings. Why keep an older DT who under performed the last season he played? Its better for the Jags to make the big cuts now and put themselves in a better position in 2020 in my opinion. That stupid Bortles contract really ***** them.

In any tax system there is incentive to cheat, I do agree that a sales tax is much easier to cheat and skim than income which has a two party reporting system in most non-service industries. If you moved to a national sales tax you simply would not raise more money than the current progressive tax system. Rich people do not spend their income at nearly the same rate. Just to keep things simple and flat for sake of argument. Lets say that someone earning 1 million dollars gets taxed at a federal level 30% after deductions plus a payroll tax capped after about 140k. That person is paying 300,000 in taxes plus payroll taxes. Now under a national sales tax with a 25% rate that person could spend all of their money earned and only end up paying 250,000 in taxes. Its more likely that a person earning 7 figures would spend 50% of their earning and save/invest the other 50% thus more than likely paying 125,000 in taxes assuming that every thing they bought was taxed and reported. Unless I am missing something it just doesn't add up.

They probably are going to cut Dareus and Jackson. Unless either takes a massive pay cut. Jacksonville has spent big the past 3 off-seasons in an effort to compete. So their cap situation is rather bad and they can't hold onto decent players on massive contracts. Campbell will probably do a restructure since if he went on the open market he would command good money. The Jags have some solid money committed to few players. Campbell, Dareus, Jackson, Telvin Smith, and Bouye all have 10+ million dollar deals on defense while on offense Bortles and Norwell make good money too. They could also consider trading Campbell too if they got a good return or he simply doesn't want to take a pay cut.

IF Trump is evoking his emergency powers to appropriate funds for a wall its a non-starter as it will get challenged in court and take years to get resolved. So I can't see it going anywhere.

Why waste national productivity when you can just move the game to Saturday? There is a bye week in between, there is no need for it to actually be on a Sunday. You can actually have the game start at 8-9 pm on the East Coast and run late since it isn't a school night or work day the next day.

I say this as someone who has never bought season tickets for any team. But do you have a deadline to renew? If so what's the deadline? If I were buying tickets I would personally wait to see the teams off-season moves before renewing (at least free agency.) But then again I am cheap and hate spending money to see a bad team play.

KB also suffered a massive knee injury his second year and had some more moderate level knee injuries in 2017. I think he lost speed from those injuries which destroyed his effectiveness overall. KB in his rookie year was just fast enough to get a little bit of separation and use his large from to catch passes. But take away even a little bit of his speed due to injury and he had zero speed relative for a NFL WR.

Craftiness is a big part of running that gets overlooked. But that being said I hope Allen slides more in 2019. I think Allen needs to play more carefully in general. Yes he is a bigger guy so his durability might be more than a RGIII or Lamar Jackson type. But Allen's running should only be a complement to his game as opposed to a central part of it. Allen has the passing tools to be a top 5 QB in the league (Granted he has a lot of improvements to make to get there) but if he gets hurt diving for a few yards that's far more detrimental to him.

That's true, training for a 40 time can help shave off a tenth of a second or so. But while I do think that Allen plays faster than his 40 time of 4.75 I don't think he is as fast as some would have you believe. I think he game speed is probably closer to his 40 than to Cam Newton (esp Cam when he first got into the league) or some other faster QB's.

Kiko had a major knee injury since running his 40 after college. So I am not sure just how accurate you can compare Kiko's 40 time from 2013 to Allen's 40 time in 2018 esp factoring in the injury. That being said Allen does look to play faster than his 40 time. I don't know why that's the case.

He is most likely getting cut. The Jags are in cap hell and they have so much money invested on the D-line and there are several big contract players who underperformed. Dareus and Jackson in particular are 10+ million dollar contract players who are coming off of down years. C.Campbell might also get cut despite having a productive season (10.5 sacks) but his cap hit is huge at 16 million with a 15 million dollar savings if cut. Although I suspect that they will try and restructure his deal since he is still rather productive.

I know Whaley was still here in 2017 when Poyer, Hyde, and Haush were added but so was McD who had to have a significant hand in those signings. So while the 2018 free agency crop was a bust its not like McD can't identify some talent. I agree though, they only had 3-4 contracts above 3 million aav last off-season. Hard to judge them off of that.

I think once Pegula took over he inherited a 9-7 team with cap space. Whaley was probably under a big win now end the drought pressure from ownership. Trading for Shady, signing Clay, resigning Dareus and Glenn to massive deals and taking on somewhat volatile players like InCog, Percy Harvin, and others were all massive win now moves. I think overall his moves worked to improve the offense but some injuries and Rex's system then turned around and ruined the defense. Outside of Star those deals aren't major (Star's deal is hard to get out of until 2021.) Murphy's hit in 2019 is 3.5 million and Vonta will have not impact in 2019. Overall the current regime has not taken on many major contracts both in terms of resigning talent and free agent talent.