Saturday, December 2, 2017

A Nakedly Punitive Tax Bill

It happened in the middle of the night, the passage of a five-hundred page tax bill that the Senators didn't even read, a bill which is chock-full of partisan legislation and contained last-minute hand-scrawled changes.

A few years ago, conservatives claimed that the IRS was targeting conservative groups for scrutiny, though I say that any anti-tax organization merits such scrutiny. Since one of the axioms of conservatism is 'It's Always Projection', it stands to reason that Republicans would be guilty of tax policies that 'punish' liberals and other classes of people that they hate... and this has proven to be true. The GOP tax bill ends federal tax deductions for state and local taxes, a policy which directly targets the residents of high-tax 'blue' states. Even the odious Republican congressman Peter King of Long Island's Suffolk County opposed this tax bill because it penalizes a sizable contingent of his constituents.

Even more worrisome is the bill's targeting of the renewable energy industry, a regressive act which is calculated to prop up the fossil fuel industries while pissing off environmentalists.

Perhaps the most regressive policy encoded in the bill is the cancellation of nontaxable tuition waivers for graduate students, a class of individuals who are already slammed with student debt and low wages as it is. Trump famously stated that he loves the poorly educated, and the flip-side of that is that his party hates the highly educated.

The tax bill is an all-out war on the blue states, the smarty-pants liberal 'elites', the tree-huggers, and other 'enemies of 'Murrica'. It also ensures that the United States will end up a poorer, less healthy, less educated nation, an oligarchy where the loss of grandma's medical coverage helps to foot the bill for the Mercers' new yachts and the Koch brothers' new assault on what is left of the public coffers.

3 comments:

Michael Hyatt said...

Nothing in this post is wrong, but I'm still disappointed that someone of Mr. Bastard's intellectual heft somehow failed to mention that the bill the Senate Passed will NOT become law. It's different from the House bill, so they have to go to conference committee, come up with a single unified bill that will both a.) be acceptable to the lunatics in the House, b.) be acceptable to Susan Collins and her moderate Senators (they can only afford to lose two) and c.) can still qualify to be voted on in the Senate under reconciliation rules as specified by the Senate Parliamentarian.

It's not over yet.

And even if it passes, it's so toxically over the top, and Trump is so desperate to claim a legislative victory that there will never be any doubt about which party owns it, it will help cement the coming wave election next year.

We can't really do anything about Trump, but we can seriously fuck up his program by taking back at least one house of congress...

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

It's not law, but it's a statement of intent, and that intent is to fuck over Blue Staters.

The New York Crank said...

I side with 4-Bs over Hyatt on this one. The reconciliation between House and Senate versions of this bill will not inflict significantly less pain on significantly less of the population. On the contrary is will likely make a disgustingly awful bill even more puke-worthy.

As for cementing the results of the election next year, presumably in favor of us Democrats, don't bet the farm on it, even though I hope you're right. The yahoos and nincompoops voted clearly against their own self-interest when they voted for Trump last time around. As long as he dog-whistles the Horst Wessel song and carries on about his big beautiful wall, he might still win, because that's all that matters to the 40 percent of the voters who control 60 percent of the Electoral College vote.

Yours very, very, very, very crankily,
The New York Crannk