In a sickening display of uncontrolled sucking up, the Republican Party groveled in the dirt before Donald Trump, their dictator in waiting. This nauseatingly despicable exercise in keeping the child mollified so he doesn’t have a tantrum and drop a bomb was committed in the aftermath of the passing of the rich people’s tax bill, an atrocious piece of legislation that will go down in the annuls of American disgrace. Then in the aftermath of all this misguided admiration Trump appeared before the nation and lied about it being the biggest tax cut ever, which it is not. Why? Why bother to lie about something like this? It’s already a major achievement in the eyes of the GOP. They have paid off their donors and, if you don’t look too closely, made it look like they were doing something for the poor and the middle class. So what sick impulse drives this horribly flawed man to lie and spoil his only accomplishment in an entire year in office?
By passing this terrible bill, the GOP has acknowledged that they will do anything; degrade themselves in any way, in order to give their biggest donors the money they demand in exchange for the campaign funds and other financing they provide to this gaggle of congressional crooks.
These are the degenerate thieves that the Republican voters have put in office. Yes, their options have always been limited, but it’s time, if they ever expect to enjoy a livable country, that these voters choose a different path.
That’s not to say that just being a Democrat makes their candidates viable. It most certainly, as history can show us, does not. What it does mean is that American voters must, if they want to really have a representative government, show more interest in those they cast their votes for and much more interest in getting out to vote at all.
Ask any immigrant from a totalitarian country, you know, the ones Trump is dead set on keeping out of the US. They will tell you that the greatest satisfaction they get from being American citizens is the act of voting for a leader rather than having him shoved down their throats. Anyone who has watched or listened to Donald Trump or anyone who witnessed the disgusting display put on by the GOP the other day will understand what I am talking about. Putin, Gaddafi, Saddam, Kim Jung Un, the monster in the Philippines, Hitler or Stalin, all need the adulation of the crowd to make them believe in their own power. Then they all want to use that power without guidelines.
I saw a movie called “The Post”, last night at a screening and came out amazed at the lack of attention to history that we all display on a daily basis. It’s a film about the revelation of the information in the Pentagon Papers. It’s a story about brave newspaper people who told the American people the truth they needed to know. It’s about a President who thought he could violate the First Amendment and then could become a dictator. It was really the biggest story of the Nixon years despite the fact that Watergate finally got that crook out of office. We are currently watching a very similar historic turn as Trump attacks our free press with a smoke screen of lies and half truths, calling anything that he disagrees with “fake news,” even as Fox, his personal purveyor of fake news splashes lies all over the airwaves and Internet.
Trying to suppress the free distribution of news and facts is Trump’s, as it was Nixon’s, biggest story and most egregious fault, but like Nixon with Watergate, Trump’s associations with the Russians will eventually be what will bring him down. It won’t happen this year because of the craven cowards filling the rolls of the GOP, but in a functioning world it will certainly happen after November 2018.
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The big question among the current political pundits is: did the Democrats oversell how much the tax bill will hurt the middle class and the poor? So, let’s look at it. Those earning between $47,000 and $87,000 will actually get a $1,200 a year tax cut. That’s great for the next couple of years but it’s not like the corporate tax cut, which is permanent. So let’s go a little further. Doubling the standard deduction from $12,000 to $24,000 will certainly encourage many not to itemize deductions. This will save time and nerves but in many cases will actually cost money in taxes paid. Enlarging the child tax credit is unquestionably a bonus and will definitely help many poor and lower middle class families. These are all good things but what did the poor and middle class have to give back to get them?
The corporate tax rate falling from 35% TO 21% means most corporations will actually pay no taxes. As it is many of them, even at 35% don’t pay any taxes. That’s because of the vast array of lobbyist-calculated deductions available to them. If the GOP really wanted to create a functional tax bill they would have lowered the rate and eliminated the deductions, thereby ensuring that even the corporations that now pay no tax would pay something. Why do I keep harping on the corporate tax giveaway and the 2% lowering of the already low, top tax rate? Because that’s where the big bucks reside! Those who make more pay more, as they should. That’s the basis of the whole tax system. That’s what helps to offset the income inequality in this country and that’s why the new tax bill is a con. 63% of the benefits of this bill go to the top 1% of the people. If you think that’s fair you must be part of the Trump family.
The possibility of trickle-down economics creating jobs is not a vague promise, nor a faint hope. Neither is it a mistake. It’s a blatant lie and those promoting it are the most cynical, most morally corrupt, most historically dishonest crooks in the nation. On the other hand, the most historically stupid are those who believe these liars because the contradictory history is all there. It’s all been proven over and over that nothing anyone would want to touch trickles down. The rich and their toadies in the GOP have been lying to the suckers for decades and those suckers just keep buying it.
But the biggest problem, the one that nobody wants to address is, that with over a trillion dollars dumped onto the deficit, the GOP will then regress to his or her conservative roots and conveniently forget that they created this monster. They will claim that with such a huge deficit they can’t possibly come up with any money for health care, the environment, education, infrastructure, research or any of the essential elements that make life bearable in a country ruled by an idiot like Trump. Paul “The Ghoul” Ryan is already yapping about how we will have to gut entitlements. Somehow this gutter rat thinks social security is an entitlement. Just for the benefit of those who don’t get it, social security is a bank account into which people have paid so they can get their money back, with interest, when they get to a retirement age. The fact that over the years, various administrations from both parties, have seen fit to illegally “borrow” money from the SS fund and never pay it back doesn’t seem to penetrate the thick skulls of assholes like Ryan.
And yes, we currently have two people working for every SS recipient when once we had ten or fifteen or twenty depending on who you believe, but we are currently living in a nation that does not reproduce the way it once did and we are encumbered by an administration too stupid to understand that the solution to this dilemma is immigration, the same solution that built this country from a wilderness to the greatest nation on earth.
So why doesn’t Trump see this? Is he merely a bigoted racist? No, not just that. He’s obviously a racist, but more importantly he’s a crafty racist who thinks that playing to a 33% base of racists will keep him in power just like it partly got him elected. All his pre-election attacks on minorities and foreign nationals was what got him all those votes in white bigot trailer park America. Now to keep those same racists in his corner he has to deny the existence of the KKK and push the Wall and policies that keep out the immigrants we need to power the engine that is our economy.
Trump plays to the fifty year-old white guys with two years of high school, who lost jobs at the widget plant when it closed. The immigrants don’t want that job. Many of them, if not most, are better educated than that guy and unlike him could fill the thousands of jobs in tech that tat guy can’t possibly do, jobs that are currently going unfilled. That’s what we need to move the economy, not more losers getting phantom jobs in coal mining.
But it’s those same guys, the ones who believe the GOP is helping them with a tax bill designed to help only the rich, that also believe Trump will get them jobs and that immigrants are a security problem for the country. They will believe anything they are told as long as it comes wrapped in a southern drawl. They are the same people who were willing to put a pedophile in the Senate just so they didn’t send a Democrat. They are the ones who will believe the tax lies because Mitch McConnell is telling them those lies while Chuck Schumer is telling them they are being had.
So what we’re looking at is a major piece of legislation passed. Not as Trump lies the biggest tax cut in history but surely a major piece of legislation. Will it have any success? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Trump loves to tell us all about all the regulations he has crushed and how good that is for business. In fact some of it has already been good for business especially if they were about Trump’s business but most of them were reversed at the cost of our national health or the environment and will hurt the country and the world. Nobody in business likes OSHA. It’s the kind of operation that drives greedy, lazy owners crazy but it has been proven over and over again to protect workers health and their lives from those same greedy, lazy owners who love to cash the checks but don’t want to be bothered about their workers lives or health.
Killing business regulations at the cost of safety or human accountability cannot be considered national wins just because they added to those business’ stock prices. Sure Trump will get richer by more oil drilling but more wildlife will die, more people will be poisoned by water that is no longer potable, many thousands will be thrown out of their homes by the crushing effects of fouled weather systems made rogue by our additions to the damaged atmosphere. As in everything, Trump’s only consideration is, can the elimination of regulation up his bottom line with no consideration of how it will affect the rest of us.
There is a lot of talk on the Right about bulking up our military even as we shove our deficit through the roof. Trump, the draft dodger loves to suck up to the military but at some point we have to look at military spending and say to the Pentagon; you already have more than enough money. Spend it judiciously. You are the most wasteful organization in governmental history. If you get your house in order, there will be more than enough money to create the most successful cyber defense in history.
Whatever else he has or hasn’t done, Trump’s foreign policies are a disaster. Shunning NAFTA and the TPP are idiotic moves and have reduced our footprint in the world just as much as his other international moves that have insulted our allies while sucking up to our enemies. Trump brags about America first and every President has believed that, but his actions in that respect clearly show that the really doesn’t understand what that means. He is pushing hard to make America last. His latest move in Israel was incredibly stupid. It moved most of the nations in the world to vote against us in the UN and generated a clever quote from Senator Dent; “Trump has taken the fun out of dysfunction.” Hell, Trump has taken the fun out of just about everything, especially if you once enjoyed being part of the greatest country in the world.