Is there a Prozac shortage or something?
The Tax Bill Shows the G.O.P.’s Contempt for Democracy
The Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is notably generous to corporations, high earners, inheritors of large estates and the owners of private jets. Taken as a whole, the bill will add about $1.4 trillion to the deficit in the next decade and trigger automatic cuts to Medicare and other safety net programs unless Congress steps in to stop them.
To most observers on the left, the Republican tax bill looks like sheer mercenary cupidity. “This is a brazen expression of money power,â€Â Jesse Jackson wrote in The Chicago Tribune, “an example of American plutocracy — a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy.â€
Mr. Jackson is right to worry about the wealthy lording it over the rest of us, but the open contempt for democracy displayed in the Senate’s slapdash rush to pass the tax bill ought to trouble us as much as, if not more than, what’s in it.
In its great haste, the “world’s greatest deliberative body†held no hearings or debate on tax reform. The Senate’s Republicans made sloppy math mistakes, crossed out and rewrote whole sections of the bill by hand at the 11th hour and forced a vote on it before anyone could conceivably read it.
The link between the heedlessly negligent style and anti-redistributive substance of recent Republican lawmaking is easy to overlook. The key is the libertarian idea, woven into the right’s ideological DNA, that redistribution is the exploitation of the “makers†by the “takers.†It immediately follows that democracy, which enables and legitimizes this exploitation, is itself an engine of injustice. As the novelist Ayn Rand put it, under democracy “one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind, and one’s life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority.â€
In other words, refusing to take from the producers and give to the moochers is against Democracy. Funny how these same complainers refuse to stroke a check to the IRS to uphold their beliefs. They always want Someone Else to pony up by government force.
Regardless, this bill is going through. It will be signed into law. Everyone will be able to keep more of their own money, the money they worked hard for. And, if Democrats do not like it, tough. They jammed through the Stimulus and Obamacare, along with others like Dodd-Frank. When people start seeing themselves keep more of their own money, well, how’s that going to work for Democrats, who were 100% against citizens keeping more of their own money?
Oh, and
https://twitter.com/SteveKopack/status/943559547578470400
Read: The GOP Tax Bill Shows Contempt For Democracy Or Something »
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