Unhealthy Taxes

You’re going to be told that the GOP is moving on from destroying healthcare to tax reform. Don’t buy it, they are the same thing.

It’s easy to talk shit about ‘my tax dollars are going to this?’ but don’t forget, every positive thing the government does is funded by taxes, too. The government’s budget is almost entirely eaten by Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Endless War (or at least that’s how it should be named on those pie graphs instead of bullshit like ‘military spending’), combined they’re more than 2/3rds of the whole thing. Of those three, if money were scarce, which do you think the oligarchs are going to come for first?

Even our dumb allies like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker voted to increase the military budget this year by almost all of the college loan money. America is out of control with the whole military thing. Hindsight is 20/20, but I don’t think we should’ve fought all those wars and then kept fighting those wars and then never stopped fighting those wars. Could be me, though.

Obamacare, comparatively, doesn’t even cost much to the government. In a lot of ways, it’s really the epitome of what Republicans used to be in the 90s, privatised and still in the racist closet instead of the ‘17 ‘out and proud we’re nazis’ model we have. And you can already see they’re trying to kill it with a thousand cuts. They’re pretending to do weekly maintenance on the enrolling website in order to impede a few more people from signing up. Weekly. On a website. The fewer people that sign up and participate, the higher the premiums other people pay. Every time the premiums rise, more people will cancel their coverage, raising premiums for everyone else. It takes effort, but you can sabotage anything from healthcare websites to voting machines to free and fair elections to one big election that may have accelerated the end of the world to a breakneck speed.

All of this is about taxes on the oligarchy. All of it. It’s really insane. It’s so mind-bogglingly insane it forces you to realize that they are psychopaths. Why did the GOP want to get rid of the ACA and literally, not figuratively, literally, sentence more people to death and bankruptcy? Tax cuts for the wealthy. A tax on the oligarchs helps pay for Obamacare. Every bill the GOP tried got rid of that tax. They just wanted to give the oligarchs a tax cut. Now that we’ve stopped their efforts to repeal Obamacare, and literally, not figuratively, literally, saved lives, now the GOP is moving on from that to...giving the oligarchs a tax cut.

You saw Jerry Jones and Dan Snyder, two psychopaths who should be put in a time machine and beheaded during the French Revolution, kneel alongside their employees, coopting a symbolic protest directed entirely at them and their other, decrepit, monstrous, billionaire, kleptocratic cockbag peers by way of a police force that has become a militarized pauper’s prison; a self-perpetuating murder machine that penalizes the helpless, the homeless, and the person of color for existing in a public space; a police-force cum street-gang that chants and cheers while it beats back any attempt to curtail their brutality. Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones didn’t kneel to protest them. They knelt because they needed to make sure you didn’t put them on the guillotine first. Those same two assholes have donated more money than you or I will ever see to GOP cockbags for the express purpose of lowering their taxes. They don’t care about anything but money.

The oligarchs buy politicians who, rather than run on the clearly unpopular position of ‘we will make the poor die’, have their white supremacy stoked and erect, jingling keys that the destitute white idiots look at in order to vote for their own shallow grave. They’re almost certainly white supremacists themselves, but that’s gravy on top for them, all they care about is keeping just a little more money. And the more money they keep, the less money there is for programs that actually help people.

Apparently, regardless of party, they’ll never touch that military budget, they’ll never lower that fucking military budget. They’ll cut Social Security and watch old folks die before they take a penny away from a fucking plane that can’t fucking fly. They’ll cut Medicaid and watch poor people die before they stop building fucking tanks for a ground war that will never fucking be fought. They’ll raise the fucking military budget to 700 fucking billion and then tell us that single-payer healthcare isn’t fucking feasible. (Jesus Christ, Kamala fucking Harris, I was rooting for you.)

In the 1950s the top marginal tax rate was 90% on income above 300k. Marginal in this sense means people didn’t really pay 90% on every dollar over 300k, but rich fuckers making more than 2.5 million did. I’m sure back then there were loopholes and investment dodges and all that, but they still paid a whole hell of a lot more. Coincidentally, income inequality was nowhere near the staggering level of near-serfdom we live in now.

When they tell you we’ve saved Obamacare, we haven’t. We fought and won the first battle for a small part of the healthcare system. Now they’re starting the battle on the entire healthcare system. We need to fight just as hard, otherwise we’ll see just as many, if not more, people die.

Alternatively, we could seize every billionaire’s assets over 2.5 million and, this is true, fix every problem that poor Americans have. Just sayin’. And if they complain, I mean, time machine, French Revolution, fixed another problem poor Americans have.