How Revolutions Begin

So are disasters born, and revolutions made. The GOP Tax bill, just passed by the Senate now to be reconciled with the House version, makes a mendacious mockery of governance. It is a put up,  a fake out, a three-card monte for policy, and in the end, if we let them, a set of plutocratic cry-babies will walk away with the scalp of our social safety net.

Most of us know the broad outline. Huge tax cuts for the 1 percent and corporate entities that rule our nation, all of which will be paid for (or so the happy story goes) by jacking up taxes on graduate students by up to 400 percent, limiting middle class homeownership tax benefits, repealing the ObamaCare individual mandate, changing inflation calculations, and by cutting the deduction for state and local taxes.

As more than one pundit has noted, it is a bill written by the landed aristocracy, for the landed aristocracy.

So it’s bad in its inception, as economics and as policy. As an ancillary benefit, this bill will also explode the deficit. When it does, I bet what remains of my 401-K that Republicans are going to immediately start demanding cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Bam, bam. Bam. They’ve already started on Medicare, which, under congressional rules is due for a $25 billion cut in 2018. That’s just the beginning.

The poor are going to get clobbered. If the repeal of the individual mandate is maintained in the House version, some 13 million Americans will have to drop health insurance coverage in the next decade.

At certain points, words fail to convey the enormous moral, economic and cultural rot that coalesced in our legislative chambers to produce this bill. It is a monstrosity of inequality, a policy lie, an economic stupidity, placing an abusive and crushing burden on the most vulnerable of us, for the benefit of the most powerful and wealthy.

If I was a Republican right now, I would be careful about mentioning my party allegiance in mixed company.  Not mixed as in interracial or gender differenced, but mixed as in Republican and the rest of the world. They have shown themselves to be a hateful class now, and it’s likely –and appropriate – that they be treated accordingly.