The world war helped a little…
Who says that there’s a good example?
Everyone’s certainly free to pitch a better alternative with more chance of hope. At the moment, we have Republican congressmen outright admitting that they’re voting for the bill because “if it makes liberals angry them there must be something good in there, whether I’m spotting it or not”.
I’m not seeing how the Communists would have done better by encouraging the Nazis. And, likewise, I don’t see how the Democrats gain by endorsing the idea that they’re opposed because the legislation is anti-Liberal.
Saying that your strongest play is X doesn’t mean that you’re going to win anytime soon, nor that the path to that point is going to be pleasant. Who says that there’s a rainbows and kittens option?
Trump and beautiful Bill has made a laughing stock of are political system! He has the richest people in this country and most of the world bending both their knees to him! Who could have predicted this ? Worst yet is Putin owns him!….
The ever-hopeful talk about teeter totters and a natural swing/balance, not realizing that the country has jumped into the fucking abyss and that, if things get better down the road they won’t be there to see it.
If they can find hospitals. One of the results of these cuts to Medicare will be rural hospitals closing and general healthcare deserts.
In other words, we are well and truly fucked. To be quite candid, I’ve pretty much lost all hope at this point. Ever since Trump’s election, I haven’t been able to help myself from simply laughing at the ineptitude, venality, and lies that come from the GOP and its supporters. It’s not that I don’t understand what’s going on or take it seriously, it’s just that I can clearly see the cliff ahead of us and the driver is a madman with the pedal to the metal.
If someone responds with, “Well, what’s your better idea?” all I’ve got to say is…
Sometimes you are well and truly fucked, there is no solution, there is only problem. You CANNOT win them all. Welcome to reality.
Trump’s exciting new Private Police Force budget is larger than the military expenditures, in total, of practically every nation (not China).
https://www.laprogressive.com/immigration-reform/global-military-power
The passage of the Billionaire Bonanza Bill was a mathematical certainty, assuming that Donald could exert his usual threats against any wavering Republicans. (Which he did.)
A thread to lay out the numbers would have been fairly cut and dried, apart from expressions of our horror at this Really Destructive Bill.
(The latter is certainly legit. But you can see why people gravitated instead to talking about topics that might include some hope, as in 'if we get the word out about these ghastly street-kidnappings, maybe that could make a difference’.)
This is an interesting article-
Several provisions raise taxes on immigrants. That includes a new 1% tax on transfers of money to foreign countries, known as remittances. Many immigrants in the US send money to relatives in their countries of origin.
The Government debated this before- it will cause more money laundering.
Why exempt tips?
and of course-
Multimillionaires
The rich gain the ability to pass more wealth on to their heirs and dodge a tax increase. The bill includes $4.5 trillion worth of tax cuts, according to a Saturday estimate from the Joint Committee on Taxation.
The estate tax exemption rises to $15 million for individuals — totaling $30 million for married couples — and then adjust with inflation. The 2017 Trump income tax rate cuts also become permanent, with benefits skewing toward the wealthy.
Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) was caught selling stock for a company providing Medicaid exchanges just days before President Donald Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” was expected to pass with drastic cuts to the program.
…
“The stock has now fallen 43% since his sale,” Quiver revealed on Thursday.
THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP!!!
Now I can sleep easier knowing that folks can leave $15/30 million to their kids tax free . . . that most folks don’t have $15/30 million is irrelevant of course.
I’ve pointed this fact out, elsewhere. First, you’re increasing the size of the Federal government, and second, you’re creating a police state that the individual states would be overwhelmed by. That’s why we passed the Posse Comitatus Act, at the behest of the States’ Rights movement.
The failure is not developing their media, as the Republicans have done since Limbaugh. The Democrats assumed reason would generally prevail in Mai stream media, which decided Trump’s 2016 opinion on anything was as good as actual news.
I don’t want to hear a single word of complaint about this bill from anyone who voted Republican for Congress or President over the past 45 years. Either though stupidity or malice you enabled this. You encouraged this. This is your just desserts, unfortunately we all have to choke on it.
The problem with this argument is that for the Democratic Party to “develop their media” akin to Fox News et al they would have to be in lockstep and willing to bend the truth to suit their agenda; feed into outrage, misinformation, and conspiranoia; exclude all viewpoints that don’t align with party dogma and attack anyone who diverges even slightly from the current talking points; and advertise hokey medical supplements and hawk products from their corporate sponsors disguised as news while also habitually sexually harassing female employees, and CNN and MSNBC are at best a weak 2.3 out of 4 on that scale. The reality is that the GOP has been perfecting their presentation, vernacular, and tactics for several decades and they’ve honed the process of on-ramping onto fascism to a veritable art. Both the mainstream Democrats and the progressive ‘Left’ have their own media in the form of outlets, podcasts, et cetera, but they speak to the faithful—not the jaded, disillusioned, angry, wanting-to-blame-someone for the fact that their jobs were shipped overseas and their children can’t afford college or find steady jobs in skilled trades—and only create outrage among the people who are already pretty outraged at both parties for not actually doing much of anything to avert the coopting of democratic government by corporate cronyism. Electing an occasional progressive like Liz Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (which the DNCC strongly opposed because she’s *gasp* a ‘socialist’) isn’t really enough of a fop to convince habitual non-voters that you actually mean what you say about wanting to help the working poor when you turn around and take big corporate and cryptobro money to assure that the working and middle class remain screwed as they have been for the last quarter century.
Stranger
It really started to make sense to me when I read a study showing that Republicans are willing to spread misinformation they know is false if it means winning, whereas liberals won’t lie even if it means losing.
The reason it’s pointless to debate them is that they don’t care what’s true. They care about power.
I admit I was naive. I didn’t believe the studies indicating that half the country thought getting their way was more important than democracy. I was skeptical of claims that so much of this was driven by pure white supremacy (my husband has been harping for years with hot takes I just thought we’re too unfair.) I’m fundamentally flawed in my assumption that most people are like me or at least close enough like me that they would find so many of these things abhorrent. And yet here we are.
Wisconsin just pushed through their budget at the last moment to (temporarily) avoid this, as well as other cuts in that bill.
The state budget plan includes a provision that would expand the state’s tax on hospitals from 1.8% to 6% and use those funds to draw down additional federal matching dollars for Medicaid programs.
Trump’s spending bill bars states from increasing such taxes in the future, prompting Wisconsin leaders to lock in new rates before the bill is signed into law as early as Thursday, July 3.
Update:
Ron Johnson laments Wisconsin’s reach for Medicaid funds, spurred by the Trump bill he voted for
The bill passed. Trump is running victory laps. The country is thoroughly fucked for many years to come. That is all.
What I think about OBBBA is the Republicans are hellbent on destroying the United States. They don’t mind dousing the country in gasoline and lighting it on fire if it helps them in some way.
I’m curious, how long until Trump blames Biden after the fallout from this bill starts?