Dude, Republicans Just F***ed You

When billionaires and others in the top 1% get tax cuts, who do you think is losing out? That’s right — not the 1%!

It’s simple, yet apparently still too easy to ignore. If the 1% is paying less in tax, that money isn’t going to go somewhere. In particular, that money isn’t going to go to the US government. But the US government is us. When the US government loses $1 trillion in revenue, sooner or later, Republicans are going to come back and say, “Hey, sorry, but we don’t have money for health care, for schools, for roads & buses, or for other social services.” Huh? “Yep, we gave it all to the rich in the form of ‘tax reform.’ “

Cartoon by Ed Wexler / Cagle Cartoons

Actually, the health care attack was baked right into the tax “reform” bill. Republicans are sabotaging the Affordable Care Act by removing the crucial individual mandate that make it all work. They will again succeed in raising health care costs for Americans (well above what they are in other developed nations) and push millions of people off of health insurance.

In the meantime, they are also cutting important regulations that protect human health and lives. So, yeah, they are promoting more attacks on your health while raising the cost of health care and lowering the likelihood you will have insurance. Pretty sweet deal … for oligarchs who want to see the masses suffer at their expense.

A con is when someone promises you something they can’t deliver and then takes your money for the fake help. Republicans continuously run on a platform of “boosting the economy,” but their incessant tax cuts for the super rich and unicorn-fart trickle-down economics just keep robbing the middle class and poor to give to the rich. A few catchphrases is all you apparently need to convince much of the public to vote for you, though. After all, they didn’t look into the matter enough to figure out that Bush tax cuts drained the economy and Republican-driven deregulation crashed the economy.

As the New York Times essentially put it in an article titled, “A Historic Tax Heist,” the middle class and poor have been robbed at the expense of the super rich.

With barely a vote to spare early Saturday morning, the Senate passed a tax bill confirming that the Republican leaders’ primary goal is to enrich the country’s elite at the expense of everybody else, including future generations who will end up bearing the cost. The approval of this looting of the public purse by corporations and the wealthy makes it a near certainty that President Trump will sign this or a similar bill into law in the coming days.

The bill is expected to add more than $1.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade, a debt that will be paid by the poor and middle class in future tax increases and spending cuts to Medicare, Social Security and other government programs. Its modest tax cuts for the middle class disappear after eight years. And up to 13 million people stand to lose their health insurance because the bill makes a big change to the Affordable Care Act.

Yet Republicans somehow found a way to give a giant and permanent tax cut to corporations like Apple, General Electric and Goldman Sachs, saving those businesses tens of billions of dollars.

Republicans offered one fantasy after another to make the case for their budget-busting tax cuts. For example, the White House has said that cutting the corporate tax to 20 percent from 35 percent will lead to a boom in investment and wages — an argument disputed by most credible economists. Almost all of those extra profits will enrich senior executives and shareholders, experts say.

You can expect the lies to become even more brazen as Republicans seek to defend this terrible bill. But no amount of prevarication can change the fact that Congress and Mr. Trump are giving a giant gift to their donors and sticking the rest of the country with the tab.

After all, who elected these Republican Congresspeople — American citizens or the billionaires and millionaires who funded their campaigns?

And what would their funders do if they voted against the tax heist? They’d pull their money away from these “Republican traitors” (American patriots) in the next election and give that money to their opponents in primaries, all but guaranteeing any moral and thoughtful Republicans get kicked out of Congress. It has been an effective strategy for the Republican richies who run the party behind the scenes.

I actually think there are some (many?) Republicans in Congress and other governmental positions who buy their own Kool Aid. They buy into this incorrect and super simplistic assumption that less taxes and less regulation are always better. The problems are: 1) if taxes are too low, the economy and society suffer; 2) if there aren’t enough regulations, some corporations and rich people will screw you over for their own financial benefit (whether that means polluting your lungs and heart or gambling with your economy until it crashes).

If you make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, you may benefit in the short term — though, how much that extra cash actually matters to you is a matter of a separate philosophical, psychological, and spiritual debate.

However, how much does that extra cash help if it results in your society crumbling and the broader economy crashing?

On the plus side … How Republican Lawmakers Finally Aim To Cut Carbon Emissions

How Republican Lawmakers Finally Aim To Cut Carbon Emissions

1 thought on “Dude, Republicans Just F***ed You”

  1. This crook and liar Trump is horrible, and I agree 100% that his tax cuts will only benefit rich billionaires like himself, increase the debt by 1.5 trillion, and adversely cut Medicare and social security. However it’s also terrible the way the Democrats fired all the progressives from the party, and have no intention of allowing the most popular politician in the country, Bernie Sanders to run the party. It’s clear the Democrats will double down on their own mistakes, and pick another unpopular establishment Democrat like Hillary, and lose to this fraud Trump again in 2020, unfortunately.

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