By Robert P. Bomboy
It’s another case of
President Trump speaking out of both sides of his mouth.
Last week he trumpeted that the
ruinous Republican re-writing of U.S. taxes would be “one of the great
Christmas gifts to middle-income people.”
But dining privately with wealthy
friends Friday night at his swanky Mar-a-Lago club in Florida he told them,
“You all just got a lot richer!”
Yeah, that’s the
truth:
When Trump signed the $1.5 trillion tax re-write into law last week,
he squirmed through a special new loophole for big-shot real estate operators
and reaped millions of dollars on his own taxes. And his ultra-wealthy friends
across the country – who already have in their tight fists 40 percent of
America’s wealth – gobbled up the biggest tax cuts of all. As he said, they all
just got a lot richer.
What did we get? He promised we would save 35 percent on our
taxes, but it’s actually just a dime on a dollar.
“If you ask the top
one percent how Senate Republicans did this year, they’d give them an A,” New
York Senator Chuck Schumer says. “But if you ask middle-class Americans how the
Republican Senate did this year, they’d give them a big, fat, red F.”
Besides the tax-cut bonanza for the richest
one percent of us, the conservative reactionaries opened Alaska’s
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling that will mean more billions for oil companies;
and, as I’ve mentioned in previous columns, they rushed through a string of 19
tight-fisted new judges (including a new Supreme Court justice) all of whom now
have lifetime appointments to the federal courts. The Senate moved especially fast,
but quietly, to confirm 12 young federal appeals court judges — the most in a
single year since the appeals courts were established in 1891.
The Republicans were drooling at the mouth
when, manipulating the budget, they were finally able to undercut rules that
everyone had to have health insurance.
From his first day in office, President Trump
picked up an obscure law that hadn’t been used in 20 years – the Congressional
Review Act – to smash up more than a bakers dozen of important rules and
agencies that had protected Americans across the board. The rule protecting the
Alaska’s
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was one of them. A rule protecting us from oil company
corruption was another. The Federal Communications Commission and Congress wiped
out the rules that had protected our Internet privacy, and let Comcast,
Verizon, and other big cable companies write new Internet
inequality principles.
With Trump in the driver’s
seat, companies can now exploit their workers, Wall Street bankers can rip off
borrowers, dirty energy companies can
more easily pollute the air we breathe and the
water we drink, pharmaceutical companies can continue their price-gouging, auto companies can sell dangerous cars without
recalls. The big-money banks – JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, for example – stand to gain millions from Trump’s
anti-climate and anti-immigrant agendas.
Corporate donors
spent more than $1 billion on the Republicans to get their way in Congress, and they
got it. The new rules, rates, and loopholes in the 2018 budget are their
payback, and, as Trump said, they’ll be a lot richer. The giveaway endangers
us, the American people. It’s an escalation of the corrupt insider-dealing that
is becoming standard practice among Trump and his cronies.
In the new year,
the House of Representatives plans to cut poverty programs, food stamps, welfare, and Medicaid. “It’s just
perfect, isn’t it?” says Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois. “Tax breaks for
the wealthiest people who haven’t ever punched a time clock in their lives, so
that we could cut back food stamps for single moms trying to feed hungry kids.
Perfect.”
Here’s one last Christmas thought:
How rich were Trump’s holiday dinner guests? They were rich
enough to be able to afford the $200,000 initiation fee at Mar-a-Lago, plus the
club’s $14,000 annual dues.
How was your Christmas?
No comments:
Post a Comment