Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Monday, July 23, 2018

Meanwhile...

The GOP has two things to show for hanging their fortunes onto Donald Trump: Neil Gorsuch and a massive, regressive, deficit-busting tax cut.  Presumably, they will get another justice.

Let's take a look at the tax cut.  In a move that surprises no one who wasn't suckled on Ayn Rand's venomous teat, corporations have pocketed their massive tax cuts, turned them into dividends and stock buybacks.  Wages - unbelievably in an economy with "full employment" - are actually falling.  This is remarkable.  Trump's brewing trade wars - designed around a 19th century mercantile "understanding" of macroeconomics - will also cost jobs and wages.

Republicans have been running on one single fucking idea since 1980: Cut taxes for the rich and everyone (that they care about) benefits.  This has never been true.  The boom of the '80s was a post-recessionary, monetary policy boom.  Giving rich people more money is not a good idea.  It is never  a good idea, unless you are a rich person (or one of their lickspittle lackeys in the GOP caucus). 

In any rational world, the failure of the tax cut to do anything but line the pockets of corporations and Wall Street would be the end of the Trump coalition and the GOP.  All those "economically anxious" Trump voters who want the "swamp drained" would rebel against the lies they were told.  The already pissed off suburban moderates (who fretted over "her emails" until they talked themselves into voting for Trump) are already leaving the Trump Train.  That would leave the Deplorables, that we can reasonably be sure make up 27% of the population.

Meanwhile, on the Supreme Court front, the impact of Republican theocrats being able to possibly overturn Roe has led to it becoming more popular than ever

This is the part where every dedicated Democratic voter looks wearily at the mushy, non-voting populace who thought that Hillary was more corrupt than Trump and growls softly into their soy latte.

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