A House
Of Cards Built On Sand
Having failed to carry out the demands of our narcissistic President of
the United States when it came to repealing-and-replacing the Affordable Care
Act, the bumbling clowns in the GOP-dominated Congress have decided to put
their attention on something supposedly “easier”, like reforming our tax
system.
Right; as “easy” as doing long division in binary code without the help
of a computer.
Trump supposedly gave them a blueprint that would make things “so
easier”, and “so much better” for the economy that they should have no question
about whether or not they should enact it.
Here are some general ideas, you pass it this way, and we’ll have a
robust economy like we’ve never had before, we’ll pay off the debt in no time
flat, and we’ll have plenty of money to fix everything Trump wants fixed,
including his infamous wall. Well, just
until he can force Mexico to pay for it.
Hell, they’ll even have plenty of money for Trump to wage war against
Syria, Iran, North Korea, CNN, NBC, the New York Times, and Mother Nature for
all of those hurricanes.
In Trump’s delusional echo chamber, of course, this should be a done
deal. No debate; no discussion; just
pass the damn thing so Trump can sign it and move on to the next impossible
task.
Unfortunately for the orange-skinned wacky man, nothing is as simple when
it comes to the Congress.
First of all, Trump is not the first person in America to campaign on the
promise of tax reform, nor would he be the last. Our tax system is complex and complicated for
a reason. A primary reason is so that
we, the fleeced Americans, would have to pay millions every year to tax
preparers and accountants and financial software programs. It’s also complex and complicated so that
there can be a whole myriad of tax breaks and exceptions and exemptions that
can be doled out like free tokens to political friends and allies. Just look at all of the “incentives” being
offered to Amazon for the various cities that would like to be their “second
headquarters”. We’re talking political
prostitution on a level that would rival college sports recruiters in the
corrupt old days. These things would not
be possible if the tax systems at all levels were “simple” like Trump thinks it
would be.
The fact is, there is a game that is played when it comes to tax reform
that Congress has not only perfected, but they actually used it recently when
it came to their failed attempt to “repeal-and-replace” the Affordable Care Act. They offer a block period where they can
consider every and all programs in one huge marathon voting period. Every proposed idea is put up for a vote, and
it is guaranteed that every idea will get some support somewhere, but none of
them will ever get enough of a vote to pass.
They could be as close as one vote shy of passage, but it will still
just be one vote short. They all
fail. Every single idea fails. Every single reform vote fails. Then they can throw their hands up and say
“well, we tried”. Every. Single.
Time.
So what makes the narcissist Trump think that his ideas would somehow
pass when every other attempt hasn’t?
Because he’s the goddamned President Donald “Grab-Em” Trump? Because the cult that he acquired demands
it? Because he might throw another
Twitter-tantrum if he doesn’t get his way again?
But there’s something else that I’ve talk about previously that
completely undermines the GOP and Trump selling points of tax reform.
Longtime Brutally Honest readers and supporters know that I used to be an
actual card-carrying member of the GOP.
I drank the purple GOP Kool-Aid when it came to ideas like tax reform. I bought into the idea that Trump and his GOP
cohorts and their soothsayers and propagandists have been peddling like the
snake oil salespeople that they are that cutting taxes to the businesses and
the tippy-top super-elite rich would help everyone.
It's called “Trickle-Down Economics”.
The idea being that if you give big companies and the super-wealthy tax
breaks and tax cuts, they will then turn around and put that money into jobs
and raises for everyone else. This is
the idea that was peddled like tickets to “get rich quick” seminars for
countless decades, including and especially during the Great Recession. Give “the rich” money and they’ll turn around
and they would re-invest it.
Except there is a huge problem with this theory, and it rests with the
word “would”.
The more accurate word is “could”.
Yes, businesses and “the rich” *could* take the additional revenue from
the tax cuts and re-invest it in new jobs and raises for the current jobs. Then again, they also could take that money
and purchase lottery tickets with it. Or
they could take that money and spend it on elite rock concerts and vacation
venues. Or they could give it to
charities and claim it as a write-off.
But given the business world is dominated by the pervasive, persistent,
and predatory philosophy of plunder, history has demonstrated that what businesses
and “the rich” actually do is they take the money gained from tax breaks and
tax cuts and they keep it for themselves.
Let’s get back to the Great Recession.
Remember the script about “fixing” that problem? Bail out the banks, don’t let the execs go to
prison, and they’ll free up the money for the recovery. Give the tax breaks to corporations and they’ll
use the money to hire the people that were laid off. Did they actually do it? Nope.
They took the money, claimed obscenely record profits, and then their representatives
actually said that the economy was just “too unstable” to hire new people or
give their employees raises. They “may”
hire people at some point in the future, but just not right now, and don’t
pressure them on when that time would be.
In other words, they lied. Or at
the very least they turned their biggest supporters – the politicians and the
media personalities promoting the script – into liars. But, you know what they say: fool me once,
shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on
me. Fool America over and over again,
welcome to politics, and aren’t we the biggest collection of suckers and
prostitutes in the universe!
This is the keystone of Trump’s plan to help America, folks! Help out Trump’s friends, and somehow it would
help out the rest of the nation. Only recent
history has shown that it doesn’t work like that. Give Trump’s friends the money from tax
breaks and tax cuts, and they’ll keep it as profits, because that is the only
thing that the business world is concerned with. They don’t care about jobs; only
profits. They don’t care about raises;
only profits. They don’t care about people;
only profits.
And the thing is... it doesn’t really help resolve the budget problem,
because cutting taxes means cutting revenue, and the only way this can balance
out would be if businesses follow through on that promise to create jobs and give
raises. However, as history has
demonstrated, this is not going to happen.
Again, we saw this with the Great Recession, where corporations took the
tax breaks, posted record profits, and still screwed over the hard-working Americans
by not hiring and keeping wages painfully low.
So not only are the hard-working Americans who got conned into
supporting Trump getting screwed over, but the career politicians in the GOP
are screwed as well, because this affects their available revenue. And that should be important because these are
the people that claim to be “fiscally responsible”!
What makes this con game even more disgusting is that it is not the only
one being played on us suckers. It’s
just one of many. The whole healthcare “reform”
program, both current and Trump’s version, are nothing more than ways to give
the insurance companies and Big Pharma and Big Healthcare bigger profits at the
expense of the struggling American people.
Trump’s much-promised wall wouldn’t really stop people in Mexico from
coming over, but, if it is completed as he wants it to be, then it would be the
largest man-made monument in America; one that, much like China’s, would be seen
from space. And everyone would know that
it would be Trump’s. (You folks didn’t think about that, did you? We *are* dealing with a narcissist, you know.) And we all think that regulations are “bad”,
which is why Trump is able to put unqualified people in who happily dismantle those
regulations... until someone dies or is maimed or is driven to bankruptcy and then
we wonder how that could happen.
Let’s get brutally honest here... what we are dealing with is huge house
of cards being built on a foundation of sand.
It’s something that cannot be sustained for very long. And it’s not a matter of “if” it will fall,
but “when”, and if the perpetrators are lucky, it will wait until they are out
of office.
The really sad part is that none of this is new. Well, Trump’s wall is, but that’s the only
part that is unique to him. The rest of
it, the changes in the tax plan, the cutting of regulations, even the whole
thing about fixing healthcare, all of this is vintage GOP. This is the snake oil that was sold back when
I was a member of the GOP all those decades ago, before the realization came in
that this was not how the real world works.
That’s not to say that these are issues that don’t need to be
resolved. They certainly do. But we need solutions that really work. Offering the same solution that has proven
through history to not work is not only a scam, but it is also the definition
of insanity. You can dress it up all you
want to and have a celebrity TV personality pitching it, but it is still a
scam. And, quite frankly, we can ill-afford
to be led down the same road again after the last time.
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