[editorial note: please forgive my prolonged absence, due to a family medical emergency that required me to travel unexpectedly back to my home state of Texas, where the thermometer seems to be permanently esconced at 100+ degrees and nary a rain cloud darkens the sky.]
The GOP is still at it. They took a ridiculous pledge put together by Grover Norquist, the government-hating, rich-adoring, tax-fighting 'guru' of the tea party anti-tax movement. And they are determined to stick to their dogma no matter what it does to the country. Economic terrorism, in short, continues apace.
Now, any person who looks at the historical performance of the economy and the changes in taxes will note that tax increases don't kill the economy. IN fact, economies do quite well with high taxes, if those taxes are used to fund public infrastructure and educational opportunity, all of which redound to the benefit of the population by helping businesses do business and people become skilled enough to work in those businesses. Taxes, in other words, are a winning proposition.
The wealthy made off like bandits under George W. Bush. So they can clearly stomach a return of that pre-Bush tax world without it doing them any great harm. IN fact, they are wealthier now than ever, so they could pay even more in taxes without it doing the economy harm. Having the wealthy and the Big Corporations pay more in taxes would be the smartest move we could make.
And we need to raise the debt ceiling, of course. I find it just slightly amusing that the very bastards who drone on and on about fiscal responsibility are the ones who are pushing the position that it doesn't matter if the U.S. defaults on its obligations. The debt ceiling has to be raised because of things we have already committed to pay for. Failing to pay for things that you have bought is the height of fiscal irresponsibility. So I guess the Tea Partiers are just kidding when they claim to be interested in fiscal responsibility. T
The Tea Partiers really have only one target in mind--privatization of Social Security and Medicare, and thereby elimination of the best social justice programs this country has. That's their goal--making sure that vulnerable elderly people don't have Social Security to depend on and that Medicare disappears so there can be no cry for "Medicare for all" in the next health reform debate. The Tea Partiers want to eliminate working government. They claim private is always better than public. But the simple truth is that it is not.
'Course they also want to eliminate the estate tax and income tax systems. Why? Because those systems are the only things that partially act to prevent the consolidation of wealth among the very few in the top 2%. Without the income and estate taxes, upward mobility in the US will stagnate even further, because those at the top will pay even less of their share of taxes to support public infrastructure.
They want to replace all our current federal taxes with a 'consumption tax'--a sales tax that would be excessively regressive. Like the changes they want to make to Medicare and Social Security, the adoption of the national sales tax would shift the tax burden to the middle class and poor, even further away from the corporate managers and wealthy who benefit so much from what passes for Tea Party 'policies.
Huckabee testified on the national sales ta before Congress (the House, of course, which is putting on a show of talking about 'tax simplification' and 'tax reform' even while they are holding the country's economy hostage over the debt ceiling and their ideological desire to bring the government down). He argues that a sales tax would be so 'simple' and that most people can't understand the income tax.
Folks, most people--70% of us--don't really need to understand much about the income tax. 70% of us file using the standard deduction. All that group has to do is fill out a two-page form. It isn't all that hard, really. The only people that need to understand the complicated stuff are the rich people who have most of the financial assets of the country. So when Huckabee talks about simplification, it's the rich people and the corporations that he is really protecting. That figures, since the 'national sales tax' would shift the tax burden away from that group and smack onto the middle class.
And of course the pie-in-the-sky proposal (Republican Bruce Bartlett's term for the so-called Fair Tax national sales tax) would never end up at the rate that Huckabee touts on the campaign trail. He says a 23% tax. 'Course that's a tax-inclusive rate, meaning that it is a 30% rate in the terms that we understand. If you buy something that costs 100, then you will pay 30 in tax, making the tax-inclusive tax rate 30/130 or 23%. But even that isn't realistic. It will likely end up much closer to a tax -exclusive 50% rate, just to cover the huge costs of military, defense, and all the other programs that we currently fund.
Now you may think you want a smaller government. But just what part do you really want to give up. National roads? National rules for airport security? National analysis of epidemics? National courts? National legislature? National agencies to protect our water, land, air from pollution? National agencies to aid us in disasters--earthquakes, fires, floods? National agencies to protect against fraud?
Most of us are protected by, and make use of, national government protections many times a day. The Tea Partiers apparently want to take us back to frontier times when we had to depend on our own families and neighbors to survive. But back then there weren't so many of us; we had thousands of square miles of clean land, clean water, and native virgin forests to use up. Now, we've run through our natural resources so fast that we have left ourselves with very little for the rest of our civilized lives. We may even yet decimate the few wilderness areas we have left, because we allow major corporations to destroy things without paying for the destruction they cause, because we do not have the guts to practice environmentally sustainable living.
We do so much so poorly. That's a fact. But the Tea Partiers want us to return to a past that nobody has ever lived in. They want to pretend that civil rights never expanded to cover African Americans and immigrants. They want to pretend that women belong in the home raising the children and that only men are needed in the workforce. They want to pretend that personal responsibility can solve the problems of banks that are 'too big to fail' taking advantage of ordinary Americans that are too little to succeed in a world made by and for the wealthy. They want to pretend that letting the rich get richer will benefit everybody, but they know that letting the rich get richer will just increase the divide between the successful class and the rest of America, leading to a national gated community where ordinary Americans start to feel like Third World citizens.
The so-called Fair Tax is a rip-off. It's just another notch on the class-warfare gun designed to hand everything over to the winning class and strip every asset from this earth that isn't considered important to those that have more. The GOP's debt ceiling stalemeate is a rip-off. It's just another way that dogma substitutes for intellect in the GOP's anti-government agenda, an unskilled game of economic terrorism designed to strip every asset from this earth that isn't considered important to those that have more.
Hey, all you who have less. Wake up. Stand up. Call up your congressman or congresswoman and tell them that ordinary people are the vast majority of this country. Maybe someday soon, it won't matter how much money the Koch brothers spend, because ordinary people will recognize that they are being had. When that happens, all hell just might break loose. At a minimum, they'll tell Grover Norquist to go jump in a lake.....(if he can find one, with global warming heating everything up so much).
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