Remember: they hate us

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Thursday evening, November 16, 2017. Posted Friday morning, November 17.

A smugness of Republicans: That’s a giddy and awfully pleased with himself House Speaker Paul Ryan on the left gathering with other Republicans around our Mr President Trump to celebrate in advance the miracle of their delivering a massive tax cut for the rich. Hat tip to Mrs M for suggesting I post what she calls a horrifying picture that perfectly captures in their smirking glory. Photo by Al Drago courtesy of the New York Times.

From the Hill:

President Trump told House Republicans that he wants Congress to tackle welfare reform after it finishes work on a sweeping tax bill that would slash the corporate rate…

Ticking through a number of upcoming legislative priorities, Trump briefly mentioned welfare reform, sources in the room said.

“We need to do that. I want to do that,” Trump told rank-and-file lawmakers in a conference room in the basement of the Capitol.

The welfare line got a big applause, with one lawmaker describing it as an “off-the-charts” reception.

We don’t have a welfare system. It was “reformed” out of existence twenty years ago. What we have left is a patchwork that includes Medicaid, food stamps, some subsidized public housing, and Medicare, Social Security, and Obamacare. What the Republicans were cheering about was the prospect of “reforming” them out of existence. The goal is to impoverish us so we’re so desperate for work that will do any job for peanuts.

This is being done at the behest of the corporate rich and the rich greedy bastards who own and operate the Party and want to own and run the whole country. They need cheap and cheaper labor and they justify what they’re doing to us in order to get it by holding us in contempt. If we were worth anything, we’d be worth a lot. We’d be among the makers, not the takers.

They are actually mad at us. It’s as if they’ve assumed a terrible burden by being rich, and they’ve done it as a favor to the rest of us for which we’ve proven insufficiently grateful.

Some of the coverage of the House’s passing of their version of the Cut Taxes on the Rich, Screw the Middle Class While Playing Trump Voters for Chumps Bill has been a little breathless. Take this bit from the New York Times this morning:

WASHINGTON — With 227 Republican votes, the House passed the most sweeping tax overhaul in three decades on Thursday, taking a significant leap forward as lawmakers seek to enact $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for businesses and individuals and deliver the first major legislative achievement of President Trump’s tenure.

This is hardly news: Republicans agreeing to cut taxes for the rich, but you might think from reading this that Trump, in a triumph of leadership, had got the bill passed all by himself and secured his place in history among the great Presidents. Always keep in mind: it’s not Trump. It’s the Republicans. He’s just their front man. “Reforming” “welfare” out of existence has been the goal for decades. It was Paul Ryan’s college dream.

Meanwhile, now middle class Trump voters won’t care when they’re eating cat food in their old age as long as they can comfort themselves with the knowledge that “those people” aren’t buying steak and crab legs with their food stamps.

The country is in the hands of stupid, selfish, greedy, and spiteful people.

November 2018 can’t come soon enough.

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The passage I quoted from the New York Times article is the lede and isn’t indicative of the rest of the article, which is more sober and casts a more skeptical eye on Trump and the Republicans, and as you always should, you should read the whole story. Follow the link to House Passes Tax Bill, as Does Senate Panel by Thomas Kaplan and Alan Rappeport at the New York Times.

Comments

[Stewart Dean]

The problem with grinding the life out of the middle class is that you're destroying the market for your goods. YOu maybe be able to bring your widgets to market at lower cost and higher profit, but they'll be no one to buy them. Back when, Henry Ford paid his workers what most capitalists saw as a dangerously high wage (not just to profitability, but to what they'd come to expect as a wage floor), but Ford said, I want my workers to be able to buy what they're making.
And the other problem with grinding the life out of the middle class is that you're destroying the creativity base out of which new ideas and produtcts come from. The poor are just struggling through to the next paycheck, the rich are just playing with toys. The creativity of the middle class was the great gift of the GI Bill.
Here in the Hudson Valley there are grandfathers who were trained by and worked on the first computers at IBM, made magic and retired very well. There are fathers who worked on computers, made magic but saw the benefits whittled down and down and retired a lot less well. Their kids are bagging groceries and IBM is gone from Kingston and Fishkill and Poughkeepsie is a pale shadow. When IBM released a new model in the old days, you could see a bump in the GDP of America. Those days are gone...but the executives has feathered their nests well while gutting the company, the workers and our communities.

[Bill Wolfe]

"The country is in the hands of stupid, selfish, greedy, and spiteful people." Since we have a representative democracy, this doesn't make me feel very good about my fellow voters.