Kevin and the no good, very bad Republican agenda (part 1)
This is the second in a series of articles. In “Kevin McCarthy and Republicans and Debt Ceiling, Oh My!” it was clear that Kevin and the Republicans did not believe what they were telling the American people about budgetary restraint. If we look beneath their rhetoric, we will find what their real agenda is and who that agenda serves.
Taxes
Rather than let the debt-ceiling deal begin closing the gap between revenue and expenditures, McCarthy announced his intention to cut taxes. How is that fiscally responsible? Simply, it is not.
Historically Republicans seek to reduce taxes. George W. Bush cut taxes for the rich twice and added a tax rebate in 2008. Donald Trump ‘reformed’ the tax code making another windfall for the rich. Both presidents billed these cuts for the rich as the way to stimulate the economy that would pay for themselves. Together their cuts contributed $11Trillion to our $31T national debt. They did not pay for themselves.
Imagine receiving one of the above tax cuts for your widget manufacturing company that has already laid off half its employees because no one is buying your wares. Would you use that tax relief to re-hire workers to make more widgets that are already NOT selling? Of course not! Your furloughed employees will spend their tax relief on food, clothing, and housing, not widgets, further reducing demand for your products.
Since the lion’s share of tax cuts accrues to the top 5%, what do businesses, large corporations and the rich do with their tax rebates? One thing large corporations do with significant tax cuts is stock buybacks, something that was illegal until the Reagan administration. Buybacks cause the stock price to rise, thereby increasing their wealth and that of their rich shareholders.
Tax cuts for the rich and large corporations do not stimulate the economy. They ONLY make them richer and the poor more so, increasing the wealth gap in America.
Regulations
Cutting regulations has been a mantra of the Republican party for my entire adult life. Recently, Norfolk Southern lobbied the Trump administration to get reduced safety regulations. The wheel bearing failure that caused the derailment and subsequent disaster in East Palestine, Ohio is the product of those hamstrung regulations.
In fact, it is more profitable to ignore safety rules. Just as it is cheaper for a company to dump waste into the nearest river than to dispose of it properly, cheaper to spew air borne waste into the atmosphere, cheaper to use inexpensive nonfood fillers in our food. It is more profitable to build whatever you want, wherever you want than to go through an expensive approval process and follow building codes. It is more profitable to pay workers as little as possible, not offer health benefits, nor provide safe working conditions.
Cutting regulations increases profitability and mostly benefits the richest among us while endangering the lives of the rest of us.
Small Government
Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform once famously said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
What is so appealing about a smaller government? In the recent negotiations over the debt-ceiling Speaker Kevin McCarthy initially asked for a 22% across the board reduction in spending (not including the military). The bill specifically targeted an increase to the IRS budget from the Inflation Reduction Act passed by the Biden administration. Some of that IRS increase was meant to restore cuts by previous administrations. Most of it, however, was earmarked for collecting taxes from the rich.
Lopping 22% off federal funding would reduce the enforcement power of every regulatory agency, not just the IRS. If you cannot curtail or diminish regulations through legislation and lobbying, the second most effective means, achieving comparable results, is to make the rules impossible to implement by making government small enough to drown in a bathtub.
Slashing funding, in addition to crushing enforcement capabilities, reduces the effectiveness of our social safety net. This translates into less money available for unemployment insurance, SNAP benefits, Veterans benefits, Medicaid, child tax credits, school lunch programs, Pell grants, and other programs for the poorest among us.
In the end reducing the size of government becomes a downward spiral feeding on itself. Smaller government is less effective. Now Republicans can tout that our government is not working, therefore, more cuts should be made.
The difference between cutting regulations and reducing the size of government is that, by circumventing laws and regulations, one can be prosecuted for doing so… if only there were funds for that.
Smaller government benefits only the rich while forcing the poor further into poverty.
Kevin and the no good, very bad Republican agenda
Republicans, regardless of their rhetorical misrepresentation, enact tax cuts, eliminate regulations, and make government smaller to benefit the rich. They support the same actions at state and local levels, as well, to the same effect. The rest of us do not economically matter.
One more thing
The richest among us will support whatever form of government that best supports them whether it is a dictatorship or a democracy. If we are to continue our American experiment with Democracy, we must take our country back from the rich. We must force them into their proper place in a democracy: Serving the Common Good.
Electing Democrats is the only way forward for democracy. Show your ‘followers’ as you drive around your community where you stand. Put one of these on your car:
A Biden campaign speech about inflation
There are a great many issues on the ballot on November 8, 2022: abortion, gun control, climate action, and democracy to name a few. Every poll, however, says that the economy and inflation are at the top of the list in voters’ minds.
Currently Democratic candidates are doing an excellent job of ignoring inflation and the economy. President Biden recently addressed the issue in this way, “The economy is strong.” That is not enough, Joe. Listen up. I am going to tell you what you need to say if we are to keep control of the House of Representatives and gain a couple of seats in the Senate. Here is a speech you can give. Excuse me if I don’t get the voice completely right.
President Biden steps to the podium and begins:
My fellow Americans when I was running for President of the United States, I said there would be no Malarkey. I meant it. I understand your pain when you go to fill up your tank or buy groceries. Inflation in America is at its highest in 40 years. You may not think so, but my administration is doing everything possible to bring the inflation down without causing a recession. Meanwhile the Republicans are working really hard to convince you that we caused the inflation and are doing nothing. So, let’s talk about inflation for a minute.
America isn’t the only country experiencing record inflation. Most countries around the world are in the same boat. Over 100 countries have worse inflation than ours. Prime Minister Truss in Britain may lose her job because she thinks the solution is to give tax breaks to the rich.
Biden leans over and whispers into the mic:
Everybody knows that won’t work.
Then continues,
In France the entire country is prepared to go on strike because they need relief from rising prices.
You gotta ask yourself, ‘If old Joe here caused our inflation, how come so many countries are suffering from it?’ The answer is simple. I didn’t. This global inflation was caused by how all of us nations reacted to the pandemic, putting billions and billions of dollars into circulation to make sure COVID didn’t kill 50 million people before we had vaccines, to make sure our citizens didn’t starve while we waited, and to make sure our economies didn’t crash and make things even worse. In America, most of that money was spent before I became President.
Regardless of who you elected in 2020, our rescue effort during the pandemic was going to cause inflation. You elected me. That makes the pandemic inflation my problem.
Then in February, Russia invaded Ukraine wrecking the supplies of oil and wheat around the world. Gasoline and grocery prices soared. Just as gasoline was becoming affordable again, OPEC decided to cut production by 2 million barrels per day. And that’s where we stand now.
The Fed is raising interest rates to slow the economy a little without causing a deep recession. We’ve passed the Inflation Reduction Act. We’ve lowered prescription drug prices and opened the strategic oil reserve so we can pump and refine more oil. There is legislation before congress to reduce our dependence on oil and make America energy independent… from oil. Legislation to allow farmers to grow more to reduce food prices, to invest in childcare to reduce its cost to our working parents and to tax the rich so they pay their fair share toward running America. I could go on.
But the point is that getting this inflation under control is going to take time, more time than we have before November 8. If you want to see this inflation problem solved, if you want to protect a women’s right to choose, if you want to have sensible gun controls, if you want to act decisively on climate change, if you want the January 6 perpetrators to be held responsible for their actions, then you need to give us more time. You need to vote to keep the Democrats in control of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
If the Republicans are put in charge, we will still have this inflation and they will raise taxes on the poor and middle class, ban abortion nationwide, end Social Security and Medicare, continue to deny that Climate Change exists, and let the planners and instigators of January 6 off Scot-free. The choice is clear.
That’s why I need you to get out and vote for Democrats on November 8.
That’s how I see it. No Malarkey.
God bless you all.
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Men: who we are, what we have done… and women
Have you watched Tosh.0 on Comedy Central? Every episode starts with a person doing something incredibly stupid like trying to jump over a garage on a skateboard. The opening endeavor always goes sideways. Broken bones ensue. That person? Invariably male, never female. That says a lot about us men. We are aggressive, impulsive, strong, and fearless.
It is also indicative of how homo sapiens has arrived at this moment in time on this tiny blue marble on the outskirts of a remote galaxy. We live in complex houses, wear clothing, have built magnificent cities. We invented machines that fly and others that roll on the ground to get us from one place to another. Most things we need to survive are supplied by someone other than me… or you. Our fundamental needs are built, manufactured, and grown by other people, then traded globally, using something as imaginary as elves: money.
We humans read, write, and communicate with one another wirelessly around the globe. We have been to outer space, to the bottom of the ocean, and lifted our species out of the dirt to unimaginable heights. We are singular among the animal kingdom in the civilization we have created.
Although women and others have significantly contributed to the creation of civilization, it is the males of the species, skateboards in tow, who have driven us forward to where we are now. If you do not believe this, ask any man.
Before you abandon this essay as ‘just another misogynistic rant,’ consider where we really are. The water we drink and air we breathe is so polluted it kills 9 million of us annually. In our zeal to achieve, we have screwed up the climate for the entire planet. Weather events that once occurred every 100 years manifest somewhere annually wiping out another 5 million. By 2050 more than 25% of all species that exist today will become extinct. How long can we continue our current trajectory without joining them in oblivion? How hot does it have to get before someone with the proper codes loses his mind (yes, his) and ends climate change with a nuclear winter bang wiping out most of humanity?
We have named the present geologic age the Anthropocene. “Anthro” for man because we have changed this planet more than all the geologic events in the last 4 billion years… combined. We, homo sapiens, are the most destructive event this planet has experienced since life emerged.
If we men take credit for our present amazing existence, then, it is only fair that we bear responsibility for the rest of it as well. The question that begs asking is, “What lunatic put us in charge?” The answer is easy: we did. We just took over subjugating or eliminating any opposition.
We may have driven humanity to build this civilization, fuel it, and launch it to a great height, but now, we collectively are headed into the mouth of the abyss. Meanwhile the richest people on earth (men… again!) continue squabbling over who has the biggest rocket.
In a recent visit to celebrate my sister’s-in-law birthday, my wife, sister-in-law, a mutual female friend, and I were in her living room. They were discussing cataracts. I say they because I was not part of the conversation.
It occurred to me that being in the same room where a scintillating conversation is happening and being invisible is how we men have treated women throughout history unless they broke a dish, put too much salt in the stew, or the after-dinner coffee was not hot enough: as slaves or property.
While we, by male self-proclamation, have dubbed ourselves homo sapiens, chosen by God/selected by evolution as the be all and end all of the known universe, it is women who have given birth to and nurtured every human life on this planet.
This may come as a complete shock to some of you men, but women are at least as smart as we are, smarter. Marilyn von Savant is in the Guiness Book of World Records, with the highest IQ ever recorded. Where do you think calling someone a savant comes from? The contributions that women have made to our civilization are many. Without Florence Nightingale, there would be no sanitation in hospitals. Had not Dorothea Dix intervened, the mentally ill would still be in brutal, abusive asylums. Smallpox would still be killing millions annually without Mary Wortley Montagu’s bold experiments. Clara Barton started the American Red Cross. Harriet Tubman was freeing slaves 11 years before the Civil War. Susan B. Anthony, despite formidable male opposition, spearheaded the right to vote for women. In the face of while male opposition, Rosa Parks was at the forefront of the civil rights movement in America. Rachael Carson planted the seeds for Earth Day and our fight against climate change. These are but a few of the women that have moved us toward a more equal and just society. Please note there is not a ‘skateboard’ or ‘garage’ among their accomplishments.
There is only one animal on this planet that rivals homo sapiens for building civilization: ants. They have been farming, ranching, and making alcohol for over 100 million years without destroying the planet. They are, except to procreate, all females.
The female of our species cannot wreak as much havoc on our planet as men have. Isn’t it time they were in charge?