So, Paul Ryan (R-Galt's Gulch) posted a Tweet over the weekend lauding the fact that a high-school Secretary would get an additional $1.50 a week due to the Trump tax cut. He said this, as if it was some kind of a good thing....and the shitty little Ayn Rand-worshiping motherfucker promptly got dog-piled on by half of the internet for it, before deleting the Tweet. But, of course, the Internet never forgets. For example, there's this guy:
Now, a word about Linguistics (and why I chose the English Standard Version for the pull-quote instead of the King James, as would be customary. The reason is that I wanted to avoid confusion in this verse, which prophesies the judgement of Scarcity being inflicted upon the Earth. In Roman times, the amount of money paid to the average laborer for a day's work was called a Denarius. Basically what this verse is saying, is that the average people will be just barely making enough to survive, while the rich (as signified by Oil and Wine, symbols of wealth in ancient Israel) will prosper and not be harmed by the End Times events, at least not yet.
Hmm, kind of sounds like the average working American could argue we're there already, eh?
Far from being "Great again" under the Republican program, we're a laughingstock, that is at the same time increasingly being seen as in some ways easily ignored, and in other ways, a threat. It's also worth noting that with the treasury running increasingly dry, we're set to borrow upwards of a trillion dollars, which is an 84% increase over last year.
You know, if the rest of the world was smart, at this point, they'd smack us upside the head and tell us no, start paying your own goddamned bills. Republicans historically like to spend money like drunken sailors on the things they want...but then they want to borrow money to pay (or cut) the things that they don't want...you know, the stuff that benefits average people like you or me, or the things we should damned well be paying for simply because they need to be done or because they involve taking care of their own people...you know...the people who ultimately generate the tax revenue that pays the nation's bills.
But of course that doesn't jibe with Paul Ryan's Ayn Randian economic platform, where the rich just take their ball and go home and wait for the world to collapse...except of course, they don't actually do that, do they? No, they use their tax savings primarily on financial speculation, which doesn't generate anything but more wealth for them personally.
Meanwhile, paying the actual bills that these motherfuckers should be paying gets punted to...at this point...generations down the road. I'm just saying, if I tried to live like that, I'd be out on my ear and no one would care. We don't tolerate a working person not paying their bills, so why do we allow half of the political class to buy into trickle-down economics and allow rich people to not pay their fair share of our nation's bills? In today's rapidly changing world, this could become a problem, real damned fast.
As for Florida, Capitalism seems to be a major driver of the problem. Now, one might ask, who tends to buy new houses in a place like Florida? The answer to that? Old people, retirees, the same motherfuckers whose lack of willingness to pay taxes (even as they themselves are hugely dependent on Federal government programs like Medicare and Social Security) has broken the state's politics for generations. What happens to those capitalists putting up new exurbs and subdivisions when retirees suddenly have trouble making their house payments, or rapidly end up underwater on their mortgages due to escalating health care costs or social security cuts?
Bankruptcy and a local repeat of the 2008 economic crisis, that's what. If people can't pay their bills or don't have money to spend on shit...much less the basic necessities of life...they you don't, you can't...have a capitalist economy. By hoarding money now (rather than keeping that money in the system in the long-term, where it generates more money for everybody including them) rich people ultimately harm even their own futures, and what happens when investments and speculation go bad? They end up in the same bread lines as the rest of us, or jump off of buildings or shoot themselves, and as they do it, they'll wonder what happened.
All this has happened before, and it will happen again. The only question is, when?
When, in Republican-land, you get an extra $1.50 a week and some rich dude gets $3,000, that doesn't work in the long term because there's more of you and me. We spend more money over all. We're the people who work for the companies that rich people own and we're the people who buy stuff from those companies as well. Invert the variables, give me the $3,000 and Paul Ryan the $1.50 and rich people will still have 90% of that money by the end of the week, because I have to pay my bills, I have things that I want, the ferrets need stuff, and so on and so forth. The only difference is, in going from point A to point B to point C that money is the grease that keeps the gears of our capitalistic system turning. That's how this country achieved the power and prosperity that Trump likes to hearken back to and that the Baby Boomers saw when they were little kids (and expected to have forever.) If you cut out the middle man, and the working man, and just give money to the rich straight up...it doesn't take that long and winding road first, it just ends up parked in some offshore account in the Cayman Islands and may not get to be a data point in the American economy at all.
Meanwhile, the elderly go hungry, kids go hungry and don't get an education, college students are saddled with debts enough to make their sacrifices to get those degrees questionable, and drug-fueled crises further fueled by despair, destruction of social fabric, lack of education, rage and social displacement (which people talk a lot about but don't do anything to address, rage on and on, and devastate mostly-conservative rural communities...that are already excessively dependent on Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and Welfare to begin with. (And what happens to those communities when those sources of income and support dry up?) We have, if you look at it not just in depressed rural regions like Appalachia but also among the urban poor and homeless, endemic problems of disease and hunger and lack of proper sanitation. Extreme capitalism has already destroyed much of the American social fabric...particularly among conservatives...and what are we left with as compensation? Trump's Nero-esque Bread and Circuses schtick.
Does watching all this dumb shit on TV pay your bills? Just curious...
Why, in this economic and political climate, if you work long and hard enough for economic and social justice...you could get co-opted and used to sell pickup trucks too!
Decent educations and good jobs and investment in communities and people, living wages, national health care, hell even a strong national defense (and people being educated and healthy enough to serve in it) don't grow on trees. If we're going to have those things and keep having them, we've got to stop prioritizing giving rich people money. We've got to stop falling for it when these people, like shitty trailer-park Heroin dealers, offer people that first hit of the drug of racism for free. They're not doing that because they like you, or because they necessarily hate People of Color themselves. They know that this particular social herpes is...like Opioid addiction...a sometimes invisible cancer eating away at the body politic of the United States of America...and the first hit of the racism drug may be free, but you know that just like a trailer park drug dealer...these people will damned sure collect their debts, or just plain rob you blind while you're stoned on the couch...before circumstances force that cancer back into remission.
And what happens when the racism itself forces American farmers...often dependent on illegal immigrant labor...out of business? What happens when food costs go up, or worse, we become a net importer of food (which will cause costs to go up even more) and there are still cuts to social security and welfare? Because of low wages, there are a lot of working people who get food stamps. Hell, even gas stations and such advertise heavily that they take EBT cards now. Food stamps, along with fast food jobs and Wal-Mart, have become a bigger part of the American economy than they were ever supposed to, or capable of being in the long term. What happens to all that, if Paul Ryan gets his cuts? Health care, perhaps excessively at this point fueled by Medicaid and Medicare, is over 20% of our economy. Trump may not know or care to know this stuff, many Congressional Republicans may be dangerously out of touch, but you and I should damned well know it. Hell, this stuff should be evident to anybody who pays attention to advertising on the TV.
Perhaps more to the point...if Republicans get their way and America descends into Third World style autocracy, chaos, death and starvation...does anybody, including rich people, really think that the American Dollar will be worth anything or that this country's place in the world will not decrease accordingly?
Go ahead, think about it, take all the time you need.
American Revelation, Part Two.
American Revelation: Part Four
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