Taxes
The motto of the Trump-era Washington Post is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Its counterpart, suggests David Roberts, might be “Conservatism Lives in Darkness.” “Secrecy,” wrote Roberts on Monday, “is the standard approach of today’s GOP…It is, in fact, the only approach possible to advance an agenda that is unpopular and intellectually indefensible.”
The national press could barely hide its glee in June 2016 when Philadelphia passed a "soda tax" of 1.5 cents per ounce levied against non-alcoholic beverages containing "any form of artificial sugar substitute, including stevia, aspartame, sucralose, neotame, acesulfame potassium (Ace-K), saccharin, and advantame." Now that the predictions of opponents have virtually all come to pass, accompanied by unintended consequences even they didn't anticipate, the national press is barely interested.
Within the next few months we can expect to see the Trump administration support a bill to lower the corporate tax rate. Of course, it is 100 percent certain that many liberal entertainers will be screaming and protesting about how unfair it would be to lower that tax rate. Every one of them should therefore be asked if they are therefore willing to quit working for the media corporations that pay them their exorbitant salaries. The reason is that Variety has reported that the media company executives, despite their political differences with President Donald Trump, are completely in support of him lowering their corporate tax rates:
In the season two premiere of HBO's Insecure, we have two big liberal themes: the wage gap myth and slavery reparations.
Amid the endless media obsession with Trump scandal allegations, important policy issues are getting short shrift. Considering that the left is happy with the status quo -- the autopilot advancement of statism -- this can only please Democrats. Based on the overwhelming trend of national and state elections since 2010, the nation now firmly rejects liberal policies. Whether or not Democrats get the message, they don't intend to move right to accommodate the electorate.
Timothy B. Lee is the Lead Writer for the "New Money" section of the reflexively leftist Vox.com. He has looked at what has happened to the city of St. Louis during the past 60 or so years, and thinks that Ronald Reagan is largely to blame. Too bad for him that most of the reasons for St. Louis's decline have absolutely nothing to do with the Gipper.
New York Times economics reporter Alan Rappeport furthered the myth that Trump’s health bill would be “cutting deeply into Medicaid” spending in Thursday’s Times, “Risky Mix: Cutting Taxes For Rich and Aid for Poor.” He was harsher on Twitter: “Cutting taxes for the rich and aid for the poor is proving to be a politically toxic combo.”
On Wednesday's The 11th Hour with Brian Williams, MSNBC contributor Charlie Sykes joined substitute host Nicolle Wallace -- formerly of the Bush administration -- for a "recovering Republicans" therapy session as the two discussed the Republican health care plan, and, true to form, Sykes made jabs from the left in spite of being a supposedly right-leaning analyst.
Monday’s New York Times featured reporter Jeremy Peters sounding awfully pleased about the apparent failure and unpopularity of Republican tax cuts in “Cut Taxes? In States, G.O.P. Goes Other Way.” Peters’ long hostility to the Republican Party is well documented, and he seemed to relish knocking down a GOP idol, a "dogmatic belief" based in "blind faith."
On Friday’s Morning Joe, MSNBC panelist Donny Deutsch pushed the typical liberal “tax cuts for the rich” narrative as he slammed the Republican health care reform bill: "The other side of the aisle will call this as a redistribution of wealth. Obviously, parties are given to hyperbole, but the reality according to the Center [for] Tax Policy is that 90 percent of the benefits in this plan go to families making $700,000 a year..."
Greg Caskey is a 27-year-old Abington, Pennsylvania, native who is a social sciences teacher at Delaware Military Academy. The academy is a thriving charter high school in Wilmington, Delaware, that was founded in 2003 by two retired military officers, Charles Baldwin and Jack Wintermantel.
In the long run, Republicans’ health-care-reform efforts are going to backfire, suggested Vox editor-in-chief Klein last Thursday. He argued that if Congress junks the Affordable Care Act, “Medicare for all” will become a rallying cry for Democrats, and once Dems return to power, “they’ll pass what many of them wanted to pass” instead of the ACA: “A heavily subsidized buy-in program for Medicare or Medicaid, funded by a tax increase on the rich. A policy like that…will satisfy an angry party seeking the fastest, most defensible path to restoring [Obamacare’s] coverage gains.”