Josef Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Dwight David Eisenhower.
One of these kids is doing his own thing. Or maybe not, if you’re Treasury Secretary Steve Mental Munchkin.
After Donald Trump told us in his State of the Bizarro Union speech that we’ll never be a socialist country (like that could happen, and like anyone seriously wants a 100 percent planned economy), Steve Mnuchin chimed in today, reassuring the country that … well, read for yourself:
"The U.S. economy is doing terrific," Mnuchin said from the White House. "And as the president talked about last night, his economic plan is working. We're not going back to socialism. We're going on an economic plan for America that works."
"We don't believe in a centralized planned economy where the government puts restraints on it," he said in the "Squawk Box" interview.
I mean, I’ve heard straw-man arguments before, but this is a straw titmouse.
And it raises a serious question for our government brain trust: When the fuck were we a socialist country?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, et al., have been calling for a 70 percent top marginal tax rate on people who earn $10 million or more a year, which would be more favorable to the ultra-wealthy than the tax system under every president from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter — a rogue’s gallery of Trotskyites that included Republicans Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford.
Or is he resurrecting the silly canard that Barack Obama was a socialist … because he raised the top rate to 39.6 percent … from 35 percent.
Steve, if you can produce an era when the U.S. was a socialist country, I will pull my still-beating heart out of my chest with my mighty texting thumbs, deep-fry it in beluga whale fat, and eat it in front of you.
Now go back to what you know best … i.e., inadvertently destabilizing the global financial system.
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