The Long Goodbye

Some things to remember as the United States slowly fades to black:

Billionaires don't need any of the things the Ketamine Kid and his DOGE twerps are happily destroying.

Social Security? Nope.

Medicaid/Medicare? Nope

National Parks? Please.

Food stamps? Come on.

Public education? Get serious.

Affordable health care? Uh, billionaires can afford anything, so...

A vital IRS, determined to look for tax cheats? Leona Helmsley, one of Trumpie the KKKlown's formative role models, said "only the little people pay taxes", and the Big Boy took that to heart.  I mean, really, why should billionaires have to pay any taxes?  They contribute so much to our country. Anyway, taxes are like stealing, aren't they?

The key thing to remember in all this is simple: the Billionaires couldn't care less whether you live or die. Whether you have a house, and food, and health care, a good education for your kids, and a secure retirement, doesn't matter to them at all. If taking things away from you will make them even richer, well, they won't give a second thought about taking them. You are nothing to them.

One last thought: Perhaps it was a mistake putting the world's largest economy in the hands of a blithering idiot who's gone bankrupt multiple times. 

Perhaps.

 

See? You Piss Off The Billionaires And Bad Stuff Happens To You

So...good bye to Joe and hello to Kamala.

The reality of our politics at this particular moment is that MONEY is much more important than mere competence. In fact, money is much more important than ANYTHING.

This probably wasn't what the Founders had in mind, but Citizens United has made it the one constancy in American politics.

You need a lot of dough to run for, well, anything.

And who has a lot of dough? Billionaires have a lot of dough.

Sure, those 5 and 10 dollar donations from "the little people'" are cute. Touching even. But come on!

So the question is "how do you appeal to billionaires?"

Why, you promise them that you'll cut their already relatively insignificant taxes.

It's just that easy! 

On the other hand, if you talk about raising their taxes, if you fund the IRS to look for wealthy tax cheats, if you encourage strong unions, if you hint that maybe the welfare of the rest of our citizens is more important than the welfare of the Forbes 500, then the billionaire class gets a sad. A BIG SAD.

It certainly isn't a coincidence that almost all of our major media corporations are controlled by very wealthy Trump supporters. If that isn't obvious after the constant harping on President Biden's age, and his "disastrous" debate showing, and his various verbal stumbles, coupled with their complete avoidance of Trump's descent into something that looks very much like dementia and a serious discussion of ALL of his crimes, foreign and domestic, then you really should start to pay a little attention as our democracy slowly slips away.

Throw in those Silicon Valley Libertarian Bros and their ridiculous belief that they are all self made men who benefited not at all from any government help, and you have a recipe for the mess we find ourselves in.

Here's the deal: if the billionaires get their wish, which is quite apparently another Trump administration, all the bad that will happen to the rest of us Will Not Affect Them In The Least. They don't need Social Security, they don't need Medicare/Medicaid, their wives, daughters, girlfriends, and mistresses will still have access to abortions and birth control, the water and air they use will still be clean, they secretly (sometimes not so secretly) admire dictators, so they're cool with whatever Putin does, a competent federal government only gets in their way, so the less of that the better, and perhaps most importantly, the supply of cheap, desperate labor will be greatly increased.

In November vote like your life depends on it. Because it may.

And Now, A Few Words About Taxes

Living in Phoenix, as I do, my daily newspaper is the, sigh, Arizona Republic, which, honestly, we subscribe to mostly for the obituaries. Morbid, I know.

I also, being somewhat masochistic, I guess, read the letters to the editor.

Mostly these are word for word rehashes of whatever garbage the writer heard most recently on Fox News. You can almost hear the spittle flying. It is sad. But it is true.

The other day, though, the Republic printed one from a fellow from Sun City, one of the myriad of bland, beige, boring, retirement camps--uh--I mean adult communities--which ring Phoenix like some breed of suffocating albino snake.

This guy was upset that the crazy socialists would tax away all the rich people. They would be forced to flee America if we tried to raise their taxes. And then where would we be without our rich people? He really meant it, too! He wasn't specific about where all those rich people would go. Couldn't be western Europe. Their taxes are higher than ours. Hmmm. Somalia? Venezuela? Russia?

Being a Sun City-ite, this guy must be of a certain age. Surely he remembers, fondly I'd guess, the 1950's. You know, that Trumpian paradise where blacks, browns, gays, women and students kept their mouths shut. Yeah. That place. The place that conservatives hunger to go back to with a passion that makes one blush. Blush, and then vomit.

Anyway, the top marginal tax rate, the rate the richest Americans theoretically pay,  in the 1950's, the Eisenhower years, was 91 or 92%. That's right.

How about the Kennedy years? Same rate.

LBJ? Took a deep plunge to 75%.

Under I Am Not A Crook it was still at 70%. Yeah, that raving socialist Richard M. Nixon was president of a country with a 70% top marginal rate!

The top marginal rate for 2019 is 37%. You could double it, and still be below LBJ's rate, let alone JFK and Eisenhower's.

If things were so much better back then...maybe we should go back to those rates, just for nostalgia's sake. Just to make some people happy again...

Hey, Whatever Happened To...

Hey, whatever happened to Benghazi?

This was going to be the scandal that brought down the Obama administration. Or prevented the Hillary Clinton administration. Or both!

Darrell Issa, super patriot, self-made multimillionaire, blah blah blah, was going to get to the bottom of "the cover-up". Remember? It was worse than Watergate! The worse scandal ever, etc etc. The Republicans were licking their collective chops, with both John "Maverick Is My Name" McCain, and his BFF, Lindsey "Belle of the South" Graham howling from the rooftops.

Then it turned out that the Republicans had gutted the State Department budget--including security--and maybe, just maybe, Benghazi was a CIA outpost. And you know how them foreigners love the CIA. Hmmm.

Hey, whatever happened to the IRS scandal?

This was going to be the scandal that brought down the Obama administration.  Worse than Watergate, etc etc.

Darrell Issa was going to blow the roof of it, expose the seamy inner workings of a corrupt President and his corrupt minions. Corruption!

Turns out the IRS is underfunded, understaffed, and swamped with requests for 501 c4 status from both left and right leaning groups. So the Tea Party wasn't being singled out for persecution after all. Hmmm.

It also turns out that Darrell Issa is kinda like one of his car alarms. Loud, repetitive, and ultimately an empty annoyance.

OK, but what about the NSA scandal! Surely this will bring down Obama...won't it?

But wasn't the Patriot Act pushed through by the Bush administration and a panicky Congress in the aftermath of 9-11? And, with all apologies to Edward Snowden, haven't people (at least those paying attention) known for years that the NSA--and our other intelligence agencies--gather massive amounts of information. On everyone, everywhere. Hmmm.

Now, we can and should have an open and informed discussion about whether this is the sort of thing that an allegedly "free" society should engage in. And how to best protect our right to privacy while still protecting the nation's security. But to pretend that this behavior is somehow unique to the Obama Administration is the sort of half-baked palaver that, well, people like Darrell Issa indulge in.

No, when the history of the Obama years is written, the biggest scandal will be how the Republican Party was held hostage by reactionary extremists, funded by a handful of greedy billionaires, and in return, how they held a country's future hostage because of their intense hatred of one man.

Now that's scandalous.