I have a feeling tax cuts for the rich aren't in Kansas anymore

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/11/22/i-have-a-feeling-tax-cuts-for.html

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH middle class tax increases are humbly offered so that the corporations can get tax cuts and provide prosperity to all, in Chagrin Falls, USA.

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Prosperity will come, because he is the Great and Powerful Oz. The Greatest, we only hire the best wizards, and let me tell you, when he takes your money, he does things you wouldn’t believe with it. It’s really magical.

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You can tell it is fiction because in the first three frames people can afford houses

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Do the people who advocate for policies that reward the rich with the hopes that they’ll bring prosperity actually believe it will happen? Or are they just using the promise of wealth trickling down to appeal to voters? How can voters fall for it again and again?

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If you want to stop this crap - change the damn law so that social security and medicare are no longer listed as ‘taxes’ on a paycheck. List them as ‘retirement accounts’. People (I wish I was being snarky - I’m not) are too stupid to understand that 90% of what they perceive as taxes are actually ‘paying in’ to the system for care when they are older (the same ‘money in the game’ they vote for trying to stick it to the layabout).

Think about it. 50% of the people in this country make under 50k a year (as a household) - 50% of the people in this country pay 0% federal taxes - that’s half. Yet ‘taxes’ are still a hot button issue. People have no actual idea what ‘taxes’ look like.

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Cartoons like this make Orrin Hatch angry. Very angry.

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My property taxes dwarf whatever federal taxes I might pay with any GOP-inspired changes. We are people of modest means, living in a modest house (800 sq feet) in what’s considered a “regular” neighborhood - relative to McMansion subs, million-dollar downtown condos etc. Still, for the pleasure of living in Ann Arbor, my combined property taxes are pushing 50 mills - around $13.50/day, 7 days a week. Neighbor’s house has sold 3 times since we’ve lived here, she’s up to $20/day, many in the “nice neighborhoods” are paying $30, $50, $60/day in property taxes alone!

All politics is local? Taxes even more so.

As for Trickle-down, the only place I have seen that work is within the thrift shop community; since our economy is still based on consumer goods. We do a lot of our shopping at thrift-shops where our money goes further to help ourselves, and others, even with the 6% sales tax applied.

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Sad, but true.

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From The American President…

Lewis Rothschild: You have a deeper love of this country than any man I’ve ever known. And I want to know what it says to you that in the past seven weeks, 59% of Americans have begun to question your patriotism.
President Andrew Shepherd: Look, if the people want to listen to-…
Lewis Rothschild: They don’t have a choice! Bob Rumson is the only one doing the talking! People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.
President Andrew Shepherd: Lewis, we’ve had Presidents who were beloved who couldn’t find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don’t drink the sand 'cause they’re thirsty. They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.

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Let’s stop calling this trickle down. I prefer the term that the man who served 8 years under Reagan, Mr George H. W. Bush used. It’s voodoo economics. Yup, the republican who brought you 43 knew it was all bullshit back in the 80’s. It took 10 years and 2 government shutdowns to change the tax code from voodoo economics to something less silly.
And here we go again. Doomed to repeat the history we seem to have forgotten.

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It’s a combination of factors. A lot of Americans sincerely believe that “some day” they will also be fantastically wealthy, and they can’t bear the thought of losing all that money to taxes, especially if those tax dollars will support failing, bloated entitlement programs… for the poor. /shudder

Another subset of Americans know that they’re getting shafted, but sincerely hate tax-and-spend libruls, so they like tax cuts because it’s a big “fuck you” to people like Pelosi and Schumer and “Shillary”.

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WE have not forgotten it. And believe me…THEY haven’t either.

THEY are counting on people being stupid and sheeple and buying into whatever THEY tell them.
“Of course this is good for YOU! trust ME!”

My sister and BiL are a median income household. They love 45 and Ryan, and everything about the GOP…WHY? Because they feel the strain of living paycheck to paycheck and think at 49 and 51 they have been wronged by the welfare system…that somehow someone lower and less deserving than they got ahead of them, leap frogged them because the bleeding heart liberals gave a hand out. They see themselves as hard working middle class and don’t understand why they have such a small tiny sliver of a piece of the pie.

They don’t get it…its the GOP who took their piece. They drink the sand, because they don’t know the difference.

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Doesn’t work if you’re trying to leave “Kansas.”

Depends. If we’re talking about the voters, the poor and middle class Republicans who support such policies, they’ve been brainwashed into thinking of the wealthy as “job creators,” so they argue for trickle-down as “common sense.” Republican politicians sometimes advocate for such policies because they’ve been brainwashed, too: see Kansas, and the Republicans who voted in the tax breaks then being shocked - shocked! - that they made everything worse. But recently, the congressional Republicans have been accidentally transparent about why they’re advocating for this - openly talking about how this is something that their donors, not constituents, want.

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No, buddy, it is worse than that; you’re already home.

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I bet he wishes he could order some NSA hacker to smoke the computers of people who dissent…

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You could go with the original name, back when it was first popularized in the 1890s. “Horse and Sparrow” - so called because if you feed the horse enough outs, then some will pass through and the sparrow might be able to find some sustenance in what comes out the other end.

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One thing that’s a kicker to me is seeing more right-wing people on social media, once they hit retirement, throw a fit as soon as they see “entitlement” on their Social Security checks. “That’s not an entitlement; I earned that!” I just…ugh…smh…the right wing campaign to define “entitlement” to mean the opposite of what it really means, actually worked, but they didn’t manage to convince people that they shouldn’t get their money back someday.

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I almost felt a twinge of regret when Bannon’s plan to Primary Orrin Hatch fell through.

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The INNER HIVE™ commentary this week points out there was in fact a “Kansas Experiment” that disproved the reasoning behind such cuts.
https://www.npr.org/2017/09/30/554506190/trump-s-tax-plan-has-echoes-of-the-kansas-tax-cut-experiment

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