Discussion: How The Senate GOP Got The Votes To Overhaul The Tax Code And Strike A Blow To Obamacare

And when the Republican/Trump base gets kicked in the nuts by this, they’ll blame the Democrats (Obama phones, welfare queens, illegals, BLM, transgenders in bathrooms, etc.) for their lot. The stupid burns.

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Promises and commitments that can’t or won’t be kept - is that enough to get your votes to blow up healthcare, the deficit, what’s left of the middle class, and to start taking apart Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security?

Collins and Flake: “That’s good enough for us.”

By the way, I hear they’re wondering where they’ll get the money to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Let’s see…where could that money have come from? Sorry, kids, it’s gone now. Try not to get sick or hurt. And those of you with cancer or asthma or other chronic illness or disability, it’s time you learn that things happen.

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2018/2020 Dems need to run on Healthcare (Single Payer, Medicare For All whatever you want to call it) and, Tax Reform (raise taxes on the 1%, lower taxes on middle class, etc). The GOP pretty much gave Dems the 2 biggest platforms that will reach the masses (not the GOP Base).

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Here’s how tax code is created in today’s R party. With hand written marginal notes.

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Does anyone else here have Republican family members that are gleeful about the bill being passed? My retiree, Medicare-recipient dad is a happy camper. I think he’s just happy to that the Dems didn’t get what they wanted. Never mind what this does to anyone else. When the Medicare cuts come next (and I’m not as stupid as Collins to think that they won’t), I don’t want to hear shit from my dad.

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Last January, the CBO predicted ten trillion would be added to our national debt by 2027. This was before the tax cuts. I believe the US budget is predicted to swell to 1.4 trillion by 2023. I think that number is now pretty optimistic.

The federal government finished fiscal 2017 with a budget deficit of $666 billion, an increase of $80 billion over the previous year. It was the biggest shortfall since 2013 and the sixth-highest on record.

Ten trillion figure link:

ETA:
As Bob Dylan said:
A hard rain’s a-gonna fall

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A few hours before the final vote, the Senate’s Republican Whip Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told TPM that leadership overrode Corker’s concerns and convinced every other member of the caucus—despite ample evidence to the contrary—that the tax cuts will pay for themselves.

Ony Republicans lack the morals and reasoning capabilities necessary to pass this dung ball of a bill. Here’s one of them working on it in the video below.

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Republicans wrote a bill in secret, that was voted on before people read it, and that was handwritten, which probably hasn’t happened since typewriters were first used in the government. All of that is inexcusable, and if any Republican ever complains about the process of Obamacare’s passes this needs to be thrown in their face immediately.

Worse, we don’t know what was slipped into the bill that no one has noticed…that could include things that the Senate parliamentarian would not allow under the rules, things that are unConstitutional (there’s already something in the mix that makes a fetus into a person), or even more damaging that what is already there. The entire process they followed is corrupt. Our only hope is that people yell enough to make them nervous, and the conference bill ends up being worse (which it likely will) and gets killed…though I expect the House to vote on the Senate bill and arms to be twisted to pass it and avoid the conference.

People will look back on this time as a shameful and sad period in American politics…I just wonder if we will survive it…

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You’re making the same mistake I saw the NYT making this morning, and one I’ve made from time to time myself: you’re speaking as if there was ever so much as a subatomic particle’s worth of good faith behind all their talk of “job creators” and all their deficit fear-mongering or that they ever once, at least since the 1980’s, genuinely believe that stuffing more and more and more capital into the maws of the obscenely wealthy will cause them to invest in the absence of consumer demand.

This was never about that. Ever. Arguably, it hasn’t been about that since the plutocrat takeover of the GOP in 1964. It has always been about systematically, and deliberately, using the machinery of government to make income inequality ever worse, concentrate wealth, and therefore power, into ever fewer hands, the “right” hands, and erode the power of the state to act as any kind of check on their excesses. It’s not even libertarianism. It is outright neofeudalism, a deliberate effort to reduce the citizenry to corporate serfdom, serving the interests of a handful of unaccountable, uncheckable, utterly lawless economic warlords.

And they’ve now reached the stage where they can do it openly. Openly pass a tax plan that constitutes borrowing money and giving it to rich people and then using the expanding deficit to contract the size and power of government, with the serfs paying them all the interest on the debt, and vomit out the same crap about “economic growth” and “pro-business” and “tax reform,” even though we know they’re just lying to our faces, in a way that basically represents open mockery of the press and their own supposed constituents.

It’s like they’re determined to force us to break out the guillotines and tumbrels.

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For your dad who’s a dreamer of another kind.

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They learned very well what trickle down means. It means it good for plutocrats and the ruling class which now includes 51 republicans, mostly white, mostly men, all uncaring…

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One party is hell bent on establishing an autocratic oligarchy.

The other party is completely fucking useless.

We are all fucked.

Politics are over.

Other remedies will be required going forward.

Let us know how that works out.

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I won’t have to, you’ll know. Have a latte and enjoy your NPR.

that’s a good trick - I wonder how that works since politics is the art of controlling one’s environment.

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Other remedies? You want Charlottesville all over again? Or fires being set in the Capitol Building? How about getting more people to vote than the current 57% who do.

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I think you took a wrong turn and meant to be at Redstate. Or Infowars.

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Good luck finding an imagination.

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The light bulb just went on chez blue. Shoulda known.

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It is for no particular item in the tax-bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually.

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