Damage Control For the Next Ten Generations... If We Survive This

(Update: Thanks again as always to Batocchio at Crooks And Liars for the link to Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please stay and peruse the other articles...)

We're facing once again the Republican Party obsession with massive tax cuts for the super-rich - trump is proposing an Executive Order to recalculate Capital Gains to the tune of $100 BILLION - and we are reminded once again that these greedy sons of bitches are not listening to the American people.

There's a beautiful article on Slate.com by Osita Nwanevu that needs to be read in its entirety:

Recent polling tells us too that support for increasing taxes on the wealthy is high, as it has been for many years now. Sixty-two percent of Americans believe that the rich pay less than their fair share in taxes, according to Gallup. Last year, the Public Religion Research Institute found that 72 percent of Americans—including 74 percent of white working-class Americans and 58 percent of Republicans—support hiking taxes on those making $250,000 or more a year.

Yet, according to the New York Times, the Trump administration is not only considering cutting capital gains taxes by $100 billion over the next 10 years. It’s openly floating doing so via an administrative mechanism that the George H.W. Bush administration deemed illegal. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the administration was mulling a change that would allow taxpayers to account for inflation in calculating capital gains, reducing the amount of tax that would be paid when the asset is sold. It is estimated that around two-thirds of the benefit from this change would go to the top 0.1 percent of income earners.

In a well-functioning democracy, doing such a thing, given the state of public opinion on taxes and the wealthy, would likely be politically fatal. Fortunately for the Republican Party, we live not in a well-functioning democracy but in the United States, and the Trump administration and conservatives backing this have surmised, correctly, that they can probably afford to publicly consider (this tax plan of evil) on the basis of a few assumptions.

The first is that most Americans aren’t paying terribly close attention to policy reporting at the New York Times or anywhere else. This is a safe bet at all times. The second is that the Republican base is willing to swallow just about any policy this administration pursues out of sheer antagonism toward the Democratic Party and the people it represents, who they believe might unravel the fabric of our country or upend the nation’s demographic balance, which is about the same as America’s fabric to them anyhow. The third is that the structural advantages the Republican Party currently enjoys—namely the composition of the Senate, gerrymandered House districts, the Electoral College—will help insulate them from the political consequences of proposing and implementing unpopular policy, as will their efforts to augment those advantages with policies that disenfranchise black voters...

Nwanevu is mostly pointing out the arguments I made earlier about the sins of Minority Party Rule: the Republicans do not really represent the will of the Majority but they've successfully figured out how to rig the electoral game. For awhile there they pretended to be a Majority Party, but lately they've been so reckless they don't even care that they're passing laws that benefit the elite few at the expense of everyone else.

Worse, these moves are destined to blow up on the country a few years down the road, likely at the moment the Democratic Party is able to work their way back into some part of federal government control, at which point the needs of fixing the damage - increasing taxes on upper incomes, cutting back on certain spending, borrowing more money to fill the deficit gap - will give Republicans the excuse of railing against Tax-And-Spend Democrats and fake their outrage back into power. We've seen this movie before, and enough voters and Beltway idiots buy into that lie.

Still, the only sane response to this is voter turnout: Turnout on such a massive scale, and favoring Democrats at such a scale, that the Republicans lose control of both parts of Congress with veto-proof majorities. Granted, that's impossible this election cycle because the Senate is only voting on a third of its seats and the best Democrats can do is 57 (three short of 60 to avoid Cloture and well short of 67 for two-thirds override) seats. But they gain enough seats this 2018 they can build on that towards 2020 and gain even more seats (and hopefully vote trump out of office and into a jail cell at the Colorado Supermax).

It's got to be turnout that can overpower Republican gerrymanders. It's got to be turnout in Red States that can rattle the hold the Republicans have on those places since the Reagan Era. It's got to be overwhelming enough for the US House that if the Republicans can rebound in 2020 they still won't earn enough seats to retake that part of the legislature.

And if the Democrats DO regain control of Congress, for God's Sake DO SOMETHING to break Republican rigging of the elections. Pass any and all laws to stop gerrymandering (even if Dems benefit from it in Blue States: IT IS NOT WORTH PROTECTING). You need to increase the number of House districts, something that hasn't been done since 1929 and is something that makes gerrymandering too easy to pull off. You need to give the Elections Commission more teeth in enforcing rules against foreign money and illegal (often negative) campaign ads. You need to pass laws creating universal voter registration, increased spending on balloting systems and protection from hackers. TAKE VOTING MORE SERIOUSLY, DEMS.

In the meanwhile, the Democrats need every bit of support to regain control for the American majority. They need your votes, they need your love. America, we can be better than the greed and viciousness of the Republican Party. We can put into office those who WILL respond to the wishes of the people.

Your voice isn't just for polls, or Twitter posts, or Facebook rants. Your vote is your voice and your power, and you need to use that more than social media now and always.

For the LOVE OF GOD, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. And get the damn vote out!