Picaro
Picaro's JournalMy sympathies
Hard to deal with things in your life like this.
Losing a parent is tough.
Be thankful that she apparently didn’t suffer and wasn’t scared and alone. She just drifted away.
Peace to you.
The goal is to create a funding crisis
There’s even more at work here.
The reason for the psychotic intensity is that the ideologues know this is the Tax Plan Two Step.
First, you drop the rates sharply on the corporations (corporations are people too...) and the extraordinarily wealthy.
Then that creates a funding crisis. Since the defense budget is a sacred cow that leaves “entitlements”: Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.
This is the Holy Grail of libertarian/objectivism/Bicherism. They can see the promised land from here.
That is the goal—to turn the clock back to before the New Deal. That’s why they’re exploding at the slightest push back.
Fighting an enemy free of shame
We live in perilous times. Trump is in the White House and the Republicans are slavering to finally virtually destroy the Federal government. Yes, they failed at repealing Obamacare, but now they are working on a massive tax reduction bill that will screw the little people and make the rich even richer. Oh, and the corporations will see the top marginal rate (which none of them pay) drop from 35% to 20% with no loopholes closed.
They can smell success.
Standing in their way is not so much the Democrats but themselves. Trump, Roy Moore, McConnell, Ryan, the election debacle in Virginia, Charlottesville, the Russia thing...
None of it looks good. Poll numbers for Trump suck and the numbers for the Republican House/Senate are even worse.
But, and this is a big “but”, the Republicans have their hands firmly on the levers of power.
The Nation’s only defense is a united front and unity with the people. The Republicans have to fear the results of their votes on this tax bill or it will pass and Trump will sign it. The Republicans have no sense of shame.
So, it really pissed me off when word of Al Franken’s indiscretions came out and I watched the Democratic unity rupture and the circular firing squad form up.
All of a sudden it was women against men. I got into a fight with my wife about this not because I thought what Senator Franken did 10 years ago was excusable or trivial, but because I don’t see a unified approach to capping this off and getting all eyes back on the tax bill.
That is all that really matters right now.
I’m confident that Al Franken can weather this storm (which may or may not have been engineered by Roger Stone the famed Republican dirty trickster).
But, as a nation, we cannot afford this tax give away.
It is dispiriting to see us get played like this and respond with the same self defeating acrimony and disunity that has led us to our current position as the party out of power.
Kirsten Gillibrand’s self serving speechifying gives the opposition exactly what they want—the nation’s eyes on anything other than this monumental fraud of a tax bill.
Expenses VS Sales
Not only did he puff up his revenues, but when expenses are deducted my operating theory is that he’s broke.
I believe that one of his primary motivations in running for President is that the whole edifice was about to crash to the ground ala Enron/Worldcom and this was a way to incent the Russians (and others) to keep the money flowing.
This means that he has every incentive to start a war so that the truth won’t come out. He isn’t just running ahead of the Russia collusion investigation but ahead of financial collapse.
This may end up being the biggest con of all time.
Cohn is an idiot and thinks we're all idiots too
Cohn is the best they got to sell this sack of garbage and he's just spouting gibberish.
There are times to to cut taxes, but this is not one of them.
Our economy is almost at full employment. Yet pay is not going up for the rank and file.
Companies are simply awash in capital and if they wanted to use some of those trillions they're holding overseas (wink wink...nudge nudge) to invest they could do so. Money used to invest can be written off as investment and isn't taxed.
Profits are at record highs and most large corporations have been buying their own stock back at a furious rate to bump up their stock prices so that the executives (whose compensation is heavily weighted toward stock grants, option awards etc) hit the bonus goals in their pay plans. Or they are investing heavily in robotics, AI, and continue to offshore operations wherever possible to take advantage of vastly lower pay structures in countries like Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Macedonia, Poland, India, China, Vietnam etc.
A tax cut without corresponding tax penalties for failing to expand operations, and/or raise rank and file, pay etc. is just a gift. But if you build in penalties the tax code will just accelerate the race to the bottom with companies seeking cheaper and cheaper payrolls and it will also accelerate the drive to automate.
This tax cut plan was supposed to be "reform", but like the ACA Repeal and Replace where "replace" was quickly jettisoned "reform" was quietly dropped and only the "cut" remains.
This plan is an outright gift to the highest marginal tax brackets (and there are members of the punditocracy that are whining because the top marginal bracket has not been eliminated) and to the largest corporations. This blatant giveaway is funded by raising the taxes of the lower, middle, and upper middle classes by eliminating or restricting the few tax deductions that still remain for the W2 and 1099 wage slaves.
That Cohn was stupid enough to get a lot of these CEOs in a room and poll them on their plans if this gift passes with journalists in the room is stunning. What an idiot!
Strongly disagree
Moore won’t bow out. He knows he can still win. As long as he knows he can win he’ll stay in.
Oh for fuck's sake
He is old. Hell, I'm 9 years younger than he and I'm fucking old.
What a douche nozzle he is. What a snowflake.
He is old and addled and a dotard. And he's fat and in crappy shape. His wife obviously hates him and I doubt his children would stand by him if not for his money which given the amount of leverage I see is probably temporary.
Barring Nixon has a President ever been more hated by more people?
Trump NEVER accepts or admits fault...
I hope they keep the rationalizations going. They will be less prepared then.
It has been a long time since Ive hated my fellow citizens
I was the prototypical angry young man in the 70’s. I had hatred in my heart and was always angry and ready to fight.
Now I’m angry again and feel a burning hatred for these people.
I cycle between hope and despair.
I hope you are right.
Im Right there with her
I find myself even more irritable than I am normally. And I’m fairly irritable by nature.
But shortly after the election one of my Republican friends told me that I needed to give trump more time after he pretty much shit all over the country for a couple months and I completely and totally lost it. I don’t do that.
When I have a political discussion with these morons I tend to be very calm and ask them questions until they start stammering because they don’t ever know anything. But in this case what he said was like waving a red flag in front of a board. I came completely unglued.
Well, that was months ago. I just don’t have political discussions with anybody now that I suspect voted for Trump. One of the stupid is a member of my golf group and keeps bringing up NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem.
The last time he brought it up fortunately a Swede was in my group and we both looked him said let’s not talk about it. He started in again and I said “you know what we don’t come here to do is talk politics...how about we just talk something less controversial like anal sex or something like that.”
That shut him right up for some reason. But that is the only way I can cope right now. I’m furious with these morons. Anyone who voted for Trump and is not consumed with remorse is dead to me now.
The sad thing is I know I’m surrounded by complete idiots. That gives me a feeling for my country which I’ve never had.
During the Vietnam war when we were all so angry with one another I never lost hope. I could see that minds were beginning to change. When we did start pulling out of Vietnam even my father (shin served in Vietnam as an advisor) stopped talking about it being a noble and justifiable war.
But now, well, this is different.
We have enough people that are willing to destroy the country because they think they’re losing control.
This grotesque tax bill is going to go through and it is going to create a situation where in about 4-8 years they’ll be able to go after Social security,Medicare—everything they wanted to go after for all these decades.
By that time I will probably be forced to retire because I’ll be in my 70s. I’m now just hoping that by some miracle my wife and I will be able to live out our days with some semblance of dignity but I don’t really think that’s going to happen.
I have never felt so hopeless and so ashamed of my own people. Because these people that are doing this to our country are in every sense of the word my people. They are white, there are educated, and they are generally pretty well off— and they are willing to burn the whole country down to keep the monorities and immigrants from getting into a position of power.
Profile Information
Name: Ernie FergusonGender: Do not display
Hometown: Plano, TX
Home country: USA
Current location: Plano, TX
Member since: Thu Apr 30, 2009, 11:22 AM
Number of posts: 1,521
