Well, my candidate, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, is out. And with his departure dies any chance of the 2016 presidential campaign being a serious effort to reconservativize and reconstitutionalize the country, because the other candidates are either RINOs or unqualified for the job or complete naif pretenders with zippo experience who don't belong in a presidential race any more than, to quote Odin referring to Jane Foster's presence in Asgard in Thor II, a goat belongs at a banquet table.
Donald Trump fits all three of those descriptions. Which neatly explains, in this time of mass psychosis, gallopingly proud ignorance, and sheer madness, why he is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, still, after several months of providing repeated tempermental, character, and policy reasons why he should be immediately cast into the outer darkness.
The Donald was at it again last night on Sixty Minutes, regaling his audience with his YUGELY original tax plan to - are you ready for this? - "soak the rich" again:
Donald Trump: I know. I know. I will say this, there will be a large segment of our country that will have a zero rate, a zero rate. And that’s something I haven’t told anybody.
Scott Pelley: You’re talking about–
Donald Trump: We’re talking about people in the low-income brackets that are supposed to be paying taxes, many of them don’t anyway.
Scott Pelley: You’re talking about making part of the population exempt from income tax?
Donald Trump: That is correct.
Big mistake. The proportion of the public that pays no taxes at all is already (slightly) over half. The takers, in other words, already outnumber the payers. That's neither fair nor culturally or economically healthy for the country. Everybody should have to pay something, regardless of income level. That's what makes the flat tax such a good idea and the embodiment of equality before the law.
All until such time as the Sixteenth Amendment and its direct taxation could be repealed and taxation restored to a population-enumeration basis - which will happen right after the sun blows up. Which is why I'm bigger on the flat tax. But not Trump, who wants to do what every other leftwingnut pol wants to do: complicate and "progressivize" the tax code even more than it already disastrously has been:
Scott Pelley: You’re talking about cutting corporate income taxes?
Donald Trump: That is correct.
Scott Pelley: Who are you going to raise taxes on?
Donald Trump: If you look at actually raise, some very wealthy are going to be raised. Some people that are getting unfair deductions are going to be raised. But overall it’s going to be a tremendous incentive to grow the economy and we’re going to take in the same or more money. And I think we’re going to have something that’s going to be spectacular.
Scott Pelley: But Republicans don’t raise taxes.
Which ought to tell Mr. Pelley all he needs to know about whether Donald Trump really is a Republican or not, much less Trump's romper-room grasp of economics.
Let's go back almost a hundred years to the election of the GOP ticket of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge in 1920. The country was mired in economic depression and social and political upheaval following the repressive, regressively socialist policies of President Woodrow Wilson (one of the founding fathers of "Progressivism"). Harding's and Coolidge's solution? Cut everybody's taxes at every level, massively, and cut federal spending in direct proportion. "YUGELY" shrink government, revenues, expenditures, across the board. Period. The result of that dramatic policy direction reversal? The roaring twenties, one of the most prosperous decades in American history.
Trump's plan does no such thing, and will consequently create none of the economic growth incentives he claims it will. How can it when the job-creators at the top are being raped and pillaged once again and incentivized to keep their wealth shuttered and sheltered and far, far away from any productive activities?
And you'll notice that Trump says nothing about spending cuts and entitlements privatization and reducing the size of government. To the contrary, he's an orthodox Democrat when it comes to such topics, with a particular taste for their BS double-talk.
After insisting that he would "repeal and replace" ObamaCare, Trump went on to reveal that that with which he would replace ObamaCare is essentially.....ObamaCare - although he would doubtless rename it "TrumpCare":
Scott Pelley: What’s your plan for ObamaCare?
Donald Trump: ObamaCare’s going to be repealed and replaced. ObamaCare is a disaster if you look at what’s going on with premiums where they’re up 40% 50% 55%.
Scott Pelley: How do you fix it?
Donald Trump: There’s many different ways, by the way. Everybody’s got to be covered. This is an un-Republican thing for me to say because a lot of times they say, “No, no, the lower 25% that can’t afford private. But–”
Scott Pelley: Universal health care.
Donald Trump: I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.
Scott Pelley: The uninsured person is going to be taken care of. How? How?
Donald Trump: They’re going to be taken care of. I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people. And, you know what, if this is probably–
Scott Pelley: Make a deal? Who pays for it?
Donald Trump: –the government’s gonna pay for it. But we’re going to save so much money on the other side. But for the most it’s going to be a private plan and people are going to be able to go out and negotiate great plans with lots of different competition with lots of competitors with great companies and they can have their doctors, they can have plans, they can have everything. [emphases added]
Sounds an awful lot like all the toxic tentacles of ObamaCare, doesn't it? Government "marketplaces," "universal coverage" - which is still as big a myth under O-Care as it ever was - expanded Medicaid, even "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor". Trump wouldn't repeal a damned thing. He'd expand it. But in a "first-class" way, of course.
Ted Cruz or Bobby Jindal or Rand Paul would never propose outrageous nonsense like this. Jeb Bush would know better than to do so because Tea Partiers suspect him of harboring just such hidden motivations as it is. But if Donald Trump touts such toxic proposals, TPers roar their approval, or at least obliviously look past them, because they no longer care about conservatism and constitutionalism and rightwing ideas. All they care about is that they've got a candidate who is entertaining and who pisses in the faces of the people they don't like, even as he introduces an agenda that those people would never dream of supporting.
This is the madness of Trumpmania. In fact, you know what this really manifests? Donald Trump is the latest "right socialist" who can "make socialism work," unlike all those "incompetents" and "dummies" in the "political class".
Mark my words, Tea Party Trumpsters, there will be a stiff and steep price to be paid for this fatal indulgence in this rankly unserious con-artistry, because you may wake up on November 9th, 2016 to realize that all you will have accomplished is to have traded one incompetent celebrity Marxist demagogue for another. Only this one will have an "R" after his name.
No comments:
Post a Comment