Some observations from Michelle Goldberg about younger Americans getting shortchanged by the highhanded tax shenanigans that the GOP has planned for our future [emphasis mine]:
The anti-Communist Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was alarmed to find in a recent survey that 44 percent of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist country, compared with 42 percent who want to live under capitalism. For older Americans, the collapse of Communism made it seem as though there was no possible alternative to capitalism. But given the increasingly oligarchic nature of our economy, it’s not surprising that for many young people, capitalism looks like the god that failed.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the wretched tax bill passed by the Senate in the early hours of Saturday morning, which would make the rich richer and the poor poorer. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the bill directs the largest tax cuts as a share of income to the top 5 percent of taxpayers. By 2027, taxes on the lowest earners would go up.
Millennials, a generation maligned as entitled whiners, would be particularly hard hit. As Ronald Brownstein argued in The Atlantic, the rich people who would benefit from the measures passed by the House and the Senate tend to be older (and whiter) than the population at large. Younger people would foot the bill, either through higher taxes, diminished public services or both. They stand to inherit an even more stratified society than the one they were born into.
Private jet owners and parents sending their children to private schools are benefitted by the planned tax policies, while Goldberg notes that cutting ‘deductions for state and local taxes, which could make it harder to fund the public schools where the vast majority of millennials will send their kids.’
The GOP could give a shit about everyone else.
The Republicans are looting the future to feed the yawning maw of the wealthy, old, white GOP supporters. They are pissing on everyone else: the young, the powerless, the poor, and the blue that opposes them. They are driven by greed, racism, and hatred, and below it all, fear of the inexorable change that will ultimately undo them.
This is a war, and at present, they hold all the levers of power. But when the pendulum swings the other way, as it surely will, this time we will not turn the other cheek. Now we must make plans so that their gerrymandering and hostage-taking tactics cannot work, and we will not sit down at a table and compromise with the architects of our country’s doom, the looters of our posterity.
There can be no future compromise with the oligarchy, especially about the future.
Michelle Goldberg closes:
The Trump era is radicalizing because it makes the rotten morality behind our inequalities so manifest. It’s not just the occult magic of the market that’s enriching Ivanka Trump’s children while health insurance premiums soar and public school budgets wither. It’s the raw exercise of power by a tiny unaccountable minority that believes in its own superiority. You don’t have to want to abolish capitalism to understand why the prospect is tempting to a generation that’s being robbed.
Steve Bannon’s expressly stated goal is, and always has been, to foment a revolution.
All of this is part of that plan. There will be some growth in the market and in inequality, then there will be a crash that’s more 1927 than 2008, which might shrink some of that inequality but it will be followed by the US debt default, as the country officially declares itself bankrupt, likely under a Democratic administration , then hyperinflation that will really make inequality rise – and by then you will truly have millions with “nothing to lose but their chains”.
tinfoilparachute 