Is there a Prozac shortage or something?
The Tax Bill Shows the G.O.P.’s Contempt for Democracy
The Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is notably generous to corporations, high earners, inheritors of large estates and the owners of private jets. Taken as a whole, the bill will add about $1.4 trillion to the deficit in the next decade and trigger automatic cuts to Medicare and other safety net programs unless Congress steps in to stop them.
To most observers on the left, the Republican tax bill looks like sheer mercenary cupidity. “This is a brazen expression of money power,â€Â Jesse Jackson wrote in The Chicago Tribune, “an example of American plutocracy — a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy.â€
Mr. Jackson is right to worry about the wealthy lording it over the rest of us, but the open contempt for democracy displayed in the Senate’s slapdash rush to pass the tax bill ought to trouble us as much as, if not more than, what’s in it.
In its great haste, the “world’s greatest deliberative body†held no hearings or debate on tax reform. The Senate’s Republicans made sloppy math mistakes, crossed out and rewrote whole sections of the bill by hand at the 11th hour and forced a vote on it before anyone could conceivably read it.
The link between the heedlessly negligent style and anti-redistributive substance of recent Republican lawmaking is easy to overlook. The key is the libertarian idea, woven into the right’s ideological DNA, that redistribution is the exploitation of the “makers†by the “takers.†It immediately follows that democracy, which enables and legitimizes this exploitation, is itself an engine of injustice. As the novelist Ayn Rand put it, under democracy “one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind, and one’s life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority.â€
In other words, refusing to take from the producers and give to the moochers is against Democracy. Funny how these same complainers refuse to stroke a check to the IRS to uphold their beliefs. They always want Someone Else to pony up by government force.
Regardless, this bill is going through. It will be signed into law. Everyone will be able to keep more of their own money, the money they worked hard for. And, if Democrats do not like it, tough. They jammed through the Stimulus and Obamacare, along with others like Dodd-Frank. When people start seeing themselves keep more of their own money, well, how’s that going to work for Democrats, who were 100% against citizens keeping more of their own money?
Oh, and
https://twitter.com/SteveKopack/status/943559547578470400
Don’t be so hard on yourself. You and the bulk of your commenters are not moochers, you just aren’t millionaires. You are entitled to collect your unemployment, Social Security, Medicare, disability, and to use gov’t funded infrastructure paid for by other taxpayers, and to rely on the security offered by firemen, police and military funded by other taxpayers, and breathe clean air and drink clean water, and to avail yourself of the courts if you need to. If I don’t complain for paying a lot more taxes than you, in essence subsidizing you, why are you complaining?
1. you have no idea if these “complainers” pay into the IRS or not. 2. The complainers don’t complain about paying their own taxes only that they be treated fairly. Did you write a check to support the invasion of Iraq that you likely supported (unless you’re like tRump and now deny that you supported the war).
Libertarian asswipes will be the first to complain about potholes, dirty air or cuts in their Social Security payments that they “earned”.
You mean the one for which the majority of the duly elected lawmakers, including Hillary and John Kerry, voted for?
Maybe AT&T will upgrade their sh!tty service. I’m dropping them anyway.
The article said they were giving $1000 lump sums and raises to employees in an agreement made well before the tax bill passed.
AT&T paid 8% in corporate taxes. We guess this announcement is a sop to the tRump administration to reward them for gutting Net Neutrality and an indirect bribe to influence the DOJ as AT&T tries to buy Time-Warner for $85 billion.
Nice try, but a fail.
Speaking of shitty, my townhome is a duplex. ATT ran the lines for Uverse back in my section this year. My next door neighbor attempted to get it. Even though the lines are literally right at the end of our driveways, which are about 10 feet longer than my Jeep Liberty, apparently, they were outside the loop. So, can’t install. But, they did manage to cut the outflow line from the upstairs bathroom. They’d been playing “where’s that smell coming from?”, and one day noticed their little dog had wet paws, and had been behind the couch.
ATT had to pay to fix and put them up in a hotel for 2 weeks.
Spectrum may be Evil and such, but, their Internet works. Have 200mbs at home.
My experience has been the exact opposite.
AT&T has terrible in office personnel. Their field operatives were always great with me.
BrightHouse was good in-house and okay in the field, but with Spectrum (Charter) taking them over, the service has gone downhill in both the field and in the office.
Nothing illustrates that better than recovering after hurricanes down here. When service was interrupted due to hurricanes, AT&T would give you a rough estimate and time of restoration. They would also give credit for the time their service was down.
The same thing happened with BrightHouse. You could get estimates of time to restore and credits automatically to your account.
When Irma went through here, Spectrum literally had their phone lines hang up after saying “we are working to restore service. We have no estimate of repair times.” No one knew anything.
After a week, my service was restored. The next two bills show no credits on the interruption of service. When I called, I was told people had to call in to get credits because there was no way they could tell when service was restored to any given area. (That’s a lie, but that’s Spectrum.)
After talking for some time, I was given a credit for 3 days without service and told by the rep to not bother them again.
Spectrum was so bad that every representative in the Florida legislature is sponsoring a bill that requires companies to document and pay for outages that are not then fault of the consumer. It’s never happened before, but Spectrum was so bad that people had had enough.
I really think that the quality of service in any large company is directly proportional to the distance from the customer and the people with whom you deal.
Customer service in this country is dead.
What you have no problem with ABC buying FOX?
…have paid into the system for all of the things that you mention.
So you are saying the “complainers” are evading the bulk of taxes the rest of us pay? How interesting.
What is “fair?”
The just Iraq war was supported with tax dollars. Are you implying that we did not pay our taxes or that you did not as you were for the Iraq regime and Saddam murdering his own people?
Libertarian will be the first to complain about potholes, dirty air or cuts in their Social Security payments that they paid for.
Liberal asswipes will complain that they aren’t able to get more money from others who have worked for and earned it.
There. Fixed them for ya.
“Net neutralityâ€. Yes, as Twitter, Facebook and Google continue to purge those that don’t toe the liberal line.
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