The craven kleptocracy I call the Republican Tax Monster, presently runs loose, in a conference committee, in Washington, D.C., sending America the clearest message we’ve yet heard, during the present Presidential interregnum: Taxes are for suckers.
Let us illuminate this general point with a single case — the idiotic House Bill provision taxing tuition waivers of gradate teaching assistants.
Before my generation, in my and my wife’s families, no one had ever got a college degree, much less completed a graduate school program. Many, including my mother and step-father, had never finished high school.
My wife and I are now retired and our elders are almost all gone. Everything was different for our generation. My older brother has a Ph.D., my wife and I have JDs. My older daughter has a Masters, while her younger sister so far has only a Bachelor degree. Many cousins have similar attainments. These attainments did not occur because our families suddenly became wealthy. They occurred because, once upon a time in America, state and federal policy, implemented and funded through numerous programs, along with some hard academic work and many jobs on our parts, made it possible for us to advance in the world academically, in ways our parents’ generation could never have dreamed.
Such government programs have costs, of course, but generations of Americans can testify, with their very lives, about the enormously higher value these programs had to us and those around us. All the good things, that ever happened to us, helped enrich other Americans, too. But Republicans today think they know the cost of everything, as they fail to grasp the value of anything.
To make matters worse, way too many Republicans have rationalized and normalized the idea that it’s OK to pass laws to steal from Americans who are just getting along, or worse, so as to further enrich those who are already filthy rich. The very salubrious and once highly regarded idea, of progressive taxation, has become anathema to Republican lawmakers. They have turned it on its head as they enact their counter-idea, that taxes are for the suckers on the bottom of the economic food chain, not for the Masters of the Universe at the top.
After all, Money Makes the World Go ‘Round.