Our Caesar Disgustus has been a miserable failure. His
only accomplishment, the tax cut, has been a failure. As middle
Americans completed and submitted their tax returns the found out
just what a con job it was as the middle and working classes average
about a penny an hour in tax relief. This means that for a standard
forty hour work week the average worker gets a 40 cent return, less
than 50 cents a week. For the year, you can buy a large size pizza
with what tRUMP has given us in tax relief.
But the kicker is that this wasn't even tRUMP's bill.
Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell conjured up this flying monkey and, for
a while, it took flight but now, when America must put pen to paper,
the country is discovering to its dismay that the slight increases in
take-home pay realized in the aftermath of the new law are being
recouped by the government in the form of diminished returns.
It gets worse. For instance, in case you haven't
noticed, and you probably haven't, the floor was raised on medical
deductions. Formerly one needed about five thousand dollars in
medical expenses before one could begin deducting the expense from
one's tax bill. Now it is over ten thousand. Limited too are
deductions for interest on home mortgages, with ceilings placed on
those deductions that affect the upper middle classes.
The result is that the singular accomplishment of this
maladministration, which has never been popular, is becoming
increasingly less so. So too are tRUMP's assaults on the environment
as his band of pirates continue the rapine and plunder. Ditto for
the remainder of his policies where the cartels are busy
consolidating and concentrating wealth and power, as they plunder the
public domain. None of this is resonating with the vast majority.
Indeed, as economist Paul Krugman points out, even his
attacks on Obamacare rung hollow. Not only is there growing approval
for his predecessor's signature achievement, but the country is
moving beyond Obama as it struggles in the grip of the insurance,
medical and pharmaceutical cartels. This was demonstrated last week
when Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders held a town-hall meeting with Fox
News. The moderator, in an attempt to demonstrate how Bernie
wouldn't resonate with his following, asked the audience—all
viewers of Fox News—how many of them favored single-payer health
insurance. The hosts didn't get the answer they expected as nearly
70 percent of the Fox followers raised their hands. The grafting of
populist hide upon the corporate pig, it appears, has not been an
entirely successful operation.
“But while today's G.O.P. Can't do policy,”
observes Krugman, “it
commands a powerful propaganda machine. And this machine is now
dedicated to a strategy of portraying Democrats as extremists. It
might work—but it shouldn't, because Democrats aren't extremists,
but Republicans are.” (1)
Krugman points out that the Republican response to the
wholly predictable unpopularity of their agenda has been to demonize
the opposition, principally two women of color. The first being
representative congresswoman Ilhan Omar one of the two newly minted
members of Congress who are both female and Muslim. Krugman observes
that “the usual suspects have gone all-out in using an
out-of-context quotation to portray her, completely falsely, as
sympathetic to terrorists.” (2) Disgustus, ramping up the
hysteria has called her “dangerous” while openly questioning her
loyalties. Omar, for the record is a refugee from the political
strife in Somalia and came to this country while in her teens. She
is now a citizen and represents a legitimate American constituency in
the Congress of the United States. You don't earn much more
legitimacy than that.
The other object of ReSCUMlickan preoccupation is the
notorious AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Likewise a woman of color, AOC has become such an object
of fascination by the idiot wrong that Fox and Fiends cannot, it
seems, spend a moment without her. They just cannot get her out of
their sights. “Over a six-week period,” Krugman relates,
“Fox News and Fox Business mentioned her more than 3,000 times,
invariably portraying her as ignorant, radical, or both.
“It's surely not an accident that these two
principal targets are both women of color; there's a sense in which
supposed concerns about extremism are just a cover for sexism and
white nationalism. But while it's still worth pointing out that while
both Omar and AOC are on the left of the Democratic Party, neither is
staking out policy positions that are extreme compared with either
expert views or public opinion.
“Take AOC's famous advocacy of a 70 percent tax
rate on very high incomes. Economists who knew anything about public
finance immediately recognized that number as coming from a widely
cited paper by Peter Diamond and Emanuel Saez, two of the field's
leading figures. You don't have to agree with their analysis to
recognize that AOC, far from showing her ignorance, was actually
drawing on solid research.” (3)
While Krugman adds that the public doesn't find these
ideas outrageous and that the filthy rich, in their view, pay too
little in taxes. Krugman could also have pointed out, as we have in
these columns, that these so-called radical proposals are
nothing more than a return to previous tax schedules, a progressive
taxation that produced far less concentrations of wealth and lower
federal deficits. It was also under these tax structures that the
middle classes were last invited to participate and benefit from
economic recoveries. If by radical one means that the
proposal is a departure from previous experience the argument falls
on its face; if by radical one means a radical departure from the
rapine and plunder now underway the criticism stands.
Krugman then goes on to reiterate the arguments long
presented in these columns that it is the reSCUMlickans who are the
extremists. It is the political wrong who have gone off the
reservation. It was the political wrong who have readmitted the
likes of the John Birch Society to their midst. It is the political
wrong that wants to dismantle the social safety net, built in the
last century as a response to the Constitutional charge to provide
for the “General Welfare”. And to maintain power, it is the
political wrong that must now attack our republican institutions and
suppress the vote.
There are reasons Disgustus and his minions are
attacking the women, for they find themselves now representing the
unholy alliance of male chauvinism and white nationalism and the
economic elites. This is the new conservative coalition. And they
still believe, as George Wallace, Pat Buchanan and Ronald Reagan
before them that they are still ascendant.
“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”
Impeach and Imprison.
_________________- Krugman, Paul. “Republicans Are the Real Extremists” The New York Times. Tuesday, April 16, 2019. Page A24
- Ibid
- Ibid
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