Elections have consequences. Sometimes, the consequences are fatal:
“This is a repudiation of the social contract that Franklin Roosevelt announced at the New Deal,” Joseph J. Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian, said of trimming benefits for lower- and middle-income families to finance bigger rewards for the wealthy. Health coverage would shrink under the Republican plan while multimillion-dollar estates would not have to pay a penny in taxes.
It’s not ever going to be possible to divine what was in the minds of everyone who pulled the “R” lever last November, thus allowing a Republican House and Senate operating under the banal indifference of the most incompetent and pathologically spiteful president in American history to rewrite the foundation of the nation’s social and economic structure, its tax policy.
With a potentially far-reaching dimension, elements in both the House and Senate bills could constrain the ability of states and local governments to levy their own taxes, pressuring them to limit spending on health care, education, public transportation and social services.
For some voters it was sheer anger, a flailing attempt to blame someone else for their own failure to attain a lush life they’d been trained on the TV to expect as their birthright. For some it was an unshakable conviction that a woman's right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy was the singular most important issue facing the country, and would be for all time. For still others it was a way to strike back at a country that had dared to elect a black president for two terms and then had the temerity to suggest a woman might do a good job at that as well.
For still others it was a Russian bot that tweeted or re-tweeted some racist meme they shared with their “friends” on Facebook to substitute for actually reading about an issue that concerned them. For some it was whining about Democratic “neoliberalism” or some other misguided drivel that prompted them not to vote in 2016, or to waste their vote on a fringe third party. Vladimir Putin is gearing up and all ready with an assist for those folks in 2018 and beyond.
Whatever their reasons, those votes have now come home to roost:
The result is a behemoth piece of legislation that could widen American economic inequality while diminishing the power of local communities to marshal relief for vulnerable people...[.]
It’s probably safe to say that the average Trump voter did not vote to consign Social Security and Medicare to their graves. They probably did not vote to gut their healthcare or their own jobs and retirements. They probably did not vote for billionaires to buy new and improved Superyachts and ensconce their spoiled and undeserving children as a permanent overclass and aristocracy to rule over them. Because with every aristocracy there must also be a permanent class of peasants. Even the dullest of Republican voters probably senses this, however dimly.
But that is exactly what they’re going to get this week, when the Republican Party votes in lockstep to gut what most of us know as the American way of life.
The New York Times gets it, even though someone there probably realizes most who voted Republican aren’t listening but are too busy sharing a Facebook post about how pro football players are betraying the nation, while the rest of us recoil in horror at what is about to happen to the country.
What we see being hastily rammed through by the Republican Congress against the wishes of the American people is the same rehash of failed policies that led to the worst and most crippling budget deficits in American history. Of course that has been the plan all along: following the irrepressible mantra that huge tax cuts for the wealthy—however unnecessary and not even asked for—will somehow trickle down to the working people in this country to improve their lives. It didn’t work before and it won’t work now:
But the trickle-down story has yet to achieve its promised happy ending. Only the beginning reliably transpires, the part where wealthy people get relief. The spoils of resulting economic growth have largely been monopolized by those with the highest incomes. Pay for most American workers has been stagnant since the mid-1970s, after the rising costs of housing, health care and other basics are factored in.
Rather than lifting all boats, this rising tide only lifts those yachts. Everything else in the sea—including the vast majority of the U.S. population—gets swamped.
Economists and tax experts are overwhelmingly skeptical that the bills in the House and Senate can generate meaningful job growth and economic expansion. Many view the legislation not as a product of genuine deliberation, but as a transfer of wealth to corporations and affluent individuals — both generous purveyors of campaign contributions.
To call this wanton money grab by the nation's richest and the corporations they run a "transfer of wealth" is misleading at best. The middle class can't "transfer" what it doesn’t have to begin with. Ultimately the only thing being "transferred" is the quality of life Americans—up to this point in time—have expected from living in the richest country in the world. Things like a safe retirement without living in fear of medical bankruptcy. Or something as mundane as having a local ambulance service, public library or new textbooks and pencils for the public schools. Or the privilege of having uncontaminated drinking water. This is the real "wealth" being "transferred" this week by the Republican Party. And the experts are fairly unanimous that this “wealth” is never coming back to us:
But recent history suggests that when corporations get tax relief, they find abundant uses for money that do not involve paying higher wages. They give dividends to shareholders and stock options to executives. They stash earnings in tax havens.
The fact that corporations are enjoying record profits and most Americans are gainfully employed at levels not seen in decades has not deterred a Party that has long since shed any pretense of representing ordinary people in this country. Edward Kleinbard, former chief of Staff at the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation puts it succinctly:
“It’s not aimed at growth. It is not aimed at the middle class. It is at every turn carefully engineered to deliver a kiss to the donor class.”
And while the “donor class” is being “kissed,” the vast majority of Americans are about to be assaulted and violated by the richest and most powerful people in the country.
In that respect, the Republican Party seems to be doing its best to keep up with the culture.
Call your Senator’s office and tell them what you think of the GOP Tax Bill.