Writing in today's NYT, Thomas Edsall lays out the details of how the Republicans in Congress have raped and pillaged the American economic system.
The details, of course, will put the "MAGA" crowd to sleep. They won't listen anyway, no matter how simple you make it.
For citizens less ardently attached to the President and his party, some of the explanations may prove disturbing. There are schemes which just beg smart lawyers and accountants to financially rape the system: If you own a factory, you can sell equipment to your wife or your friend and then lease it back, so that machine never has to leave your factory, but you can deduct the full cost of it from your income tax. Government paid for capital investment, no risk to you; it only costs the little guy whose taxes pay for this.
You can declare yourself a corporation--as Mitt Romney once informed us, corporations are people, and that is now coming true with a vengeance--or you can become a contractor rather than an employee and your income tax rate drops from 36% to 21%.
But best of all, about 1/3 of the Senators just wrote themselves tax breaks which range from roughly $50,000 to 500,000. Wow, what a great job! You can actually write yourself legal ways of not paying taxes.
Which all goes to show, the Republicans were right all along. The poor deserve to be poor and the rich deserve to be rich. The Republicans planned long and fought hard to win the Congress and the Presidency. They fooled enough people some of the time to steal legally what they coveted.
They have all the scruples of Vikings on a longboat. But they are smarter than the Vikings--they don't burn the village; they just sack and rape, pillage and plunder.
The ancient Romans had an expression for it: Audaces fortuna iuvat. Fortune favors the bold.
The Republicans, you have to admit, are bold.
The Democrats are wimps. They deserve everything that they get.
The details, of course, will put the "MAGA" crowd to sleep. They won't listen anyway, no matter how simple you make it.
For citizens less ardently attached to the President and his party, some of the explanations may prove disturbing. There are schemes which just beg smart lawyers and accountants to financially rape the system: If you own a factory, you can sell equipment to your wife or your friend and then lease it back, so that machine never has to leave your factory, but you can deduct the full cost of it from your income tax. Government paid for capital investment, no risk to you; it only costs the little guy whose taxes pay for this.
You can declare yourself a corporation--as Mitt Romney once informed us, corporations are people, and that is now coming true with a vengeance--or you can become a contractor rather than an employee and your income tax rate drops from 36% to 21%.
But best of all, about 1/3 of the Senators just wrote themselves tax breaks which range from roughly $50,000 to 500,000. Wow, what a great job! You can actually write yourself legal ways of not paying taxes.
Which all goes to show, the Republicans were right all along. The poor deserve to be poor and the rich deserve to be rich. The Republicans planned long and fought hard to win the Congress and the Presidency. They fooled enough people some of the time to steal legally what they coveted.
They have all the scruples of Vikings on a longboat. But they are smarter than the Vikings--they don't burn the village; they just sack and rape, pillage and plunder.
The ancient Romans had an expression for it: Audaces fortuna iuvat. Fortune favors the bold.
The Republicans, you have to admit, are bold.
The Democrats are wimps. They deserve everything that they get.
Mad Dog,
ReplyDeleteYou are quite correct-the Republicans are bold and shameless-they play dirty and they don'y care. Tricks like this new tax rip off or the gerrymandering in places like Alabama really leave one in awe of the chutzpah of the GOP when it comes to protecting their own interests and that of their big donors...Unfortunately, the Democrat response continues to be to bring a knife to a gunfight...
Maud
Ms. Maud,
ReplyDeleteBringing a knife to a gunfight. That's the image.
The question I'm asking is: Why have the Dems, for so long, put in place the flaccid, the halt, the wimpy. Why do they begin so many tweets with "It scares me," or "I get so depressed" or "I just feel like crying."
You just want to slap them.
Bernie Sanders at least has the virtue of sounding angry, and he occasionally comes up with a line like "Tax Scam" but the others are too wordy to stand up to the simple Trump approach: The best tax plan ever! The greatest tax break for the middle class in the history of the world!"