The Tax Massacre

We’ve got about a month, I’d say, before the next ten years become a morass of irreversible idiocy. That is to say, we’re about to experience ten awful years before we get to the horrific climate change murder years.

The results of the tax plan are not hard to predict and every single media outlet that tries to “both sides” this issue, the same way they do climate change, is fucking stupid and should be ashamed. If the two tax plans are reconciled and the bill is signed into law we are fucked. It is an aggressive redistribution of wealth - all to the top 1% - but more than that, it is a death spiral for government revenue. It is the death of the ACA, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and, by extension, the poor.

Worse still, by the rules, it’s illegal to pass this bill. In order to pass the bill through the Senate with only a simple majority, legislation cannot add to the deficit. This tax bill won’t just add to the deficit, it will geometrically explode the deficit until the credit rating of the United States is a sad face emoji. Their strategy for avoiding this unfortunate rule was to rely on an immutable truth: republican voters hate and fear math, yet at the same time will believe any math presented by other republicans. This is why climate change is still disputed. Because republicans are dumb. And because there are so many dumb republicans who will get very angry if they are rightly pointed out as such, the media is dumbed down. Every news source spreads anti-math propaganda under the guise of giving fair treatment. Accurate math is allowed only on the editorial page. Why? Because, as everyone knows, math has a liberal bent. Reality is very partisan.

The results of the GOP tax plan:

A steep drop in government revenue that accelerates over the next three years as corporations refine the way they will avoid the ever more modest taxes they are nominally supposed to pay. The way the bill is written currently - WITH FUCKING SCRIBBLES IN THE MARGINS - individuals will pay more income tax, if they are poor, if they file as individuals or families, so they’ll file as pass through corporations also lowering revenue. The IRS will receive less and less funding due to less and less revenue meaning less chance of an audit and fewer people paying taxes at all once again lowering revenue.

Because no money is coming in, but the government is obligated to spend money, guess what, the deficit will rise. The GOP hates that and, since they’re so fucking stupid, they will decide that means the government needs to spend less money.

Now, here’s where someone should cut in and ask, “Wait, chances are, there will be a massive anti-republican wave that will give the democrats majorities in both the house and the senate. Wouldn’t they be able to reverse this dumb shit?” No. Short answer: they’re either pathetically callow or in the bag of the corporations getting the bigass tax cuts they’re voting against right now. Not just that, though, but social programs won’t be seriously attacked for at least a couple of years. Until middle class white people start to feel the true squeeze of underfunded education programs, health care costs that stagger our already jaded minds, impassable roads, an increase in the homeless population, an exacerbation of the unconscionable infant mortality rate, opioids continuing to wreak havoc, and more issues that currently only the poor face; until that, the tiny tax cut mainly white people receive will make the program relatively popular, or just popular enough to defend.

This means when the deficit gets high enough, the GOP will rapidly push for cuts in the social safety net and they will get them. They will get those cuts because they do not care about reality and the democrats do. Even when the democrats are in power, they are more than willing to compromise, something the GOP has successfully demonstrated is stupid.

The tax bill absolutely proves the GOP does not fucking care. When the ACA was written, it went through a billion rewrites, edits, amendments, and fucking propaganda blitzes from conservative media and it was passed as a watered down bullshit program because, even though the democrats had a supermajority and could have passed whatever they wanted, they refused to do so. They believed that it was better to compromise and try to pass a piece of bipartisan legislation. Because they are stupid. Because they believe that the GOP can act in good faith to govern. Because they are stupid. The GOP just gave the 1% two trillion dollars in the middle of the night with a bill handwritten by idiots. All the GOP had was a simple majority and lies. Credit where credit is due, unlike the democrats, the GOP is effective. Evil, yes, but effective.

Military spending will not drop, though, as the social safety net programs will. Military spending will most likely increase, the same way that it did recently, with bipartisan support, dropping social spending still further. And hey, if we’re gonna have a bigass military, we’re gonna have to use it, so we might as well get entrenched in a few more global conflicts, ya know, to stop terrorism or whatever.

In all honesty, this might actually be a good idea. If we’re going to hand the climate over to corporations only interested in raping every last cent out of it they can, we might as well have a huge military to protect us when World War Water begins. I guess I’m selfish at the end of the day. Make Water Available Again.

Where will the democrats be? Where they have always been. They will attempt to make incremental improvements that appease their donors while paying lip service to improving the lives of the poor. They are the status quo personified and so long as the GOP is able to move the status quo further and further away from our survival, the democrats will keep us there.

We have about a month to stop this. That’s an estimate, could be a week sooner or later, but it’s around there. Until the House and the Senate bills are reconciled/optimized to fuck us over, they cannot be signed into law. In that time frame we have very few options. Can we finally admit that protests are meaningless? No matter how many people fill a square, or a mall, or wherever else, nothing changes. We’re not going to win by protesting for a day. We’re not going to stop these idiots in a way they can outlast.

Some of us are going to have to go to jail.

We are living in a class based apartheid state and it cannot be allowed any longer. The reason is climate change. Our government is actively fighting FOR climate change, our government is killing us. The American government can accurately be classified as a terrorist regime. The American government bears no resemblance to a democratic republic, and is instead now an oligarchy. The tax cut is proof incontrovertible.

We need to surround them with people. Not protests, but house arrests. We need enough people to overwhelm local police action, we need enough people to call in the National Guard. We need to send a real message to the rich.

They are not fighting a class war against us, they are massacring us in the streets. Without any consequences, the massacre will never stop.