I would love to exist in this magical fantasy land that Senate Republicans live in, where they pretend that simply declaring everything open is going to automatically recover the economy and allow them to go back about their business of doing nothing and getting paid for it. For those who haven’t paid attention, 1.) where the fuck have you been and 2.) welcome back to reality, where the people we send to Congress and pay with our tax dollars can choose to get paid to do jack shit while half the fucking country cheers them on.
The Republicans abandoned their plans to do fuck all momentarily at the beginning of the pandemic, partnering with Democrats to pass the CARES Act to provide aid to the citizens of this country who are suffering from stay-at-home orders and an economy that has bottomed out. This example of Senate Republicans doing something could have maybe presumably made the rest of us hate them slightly less.
But now that we’re in May, despite COVID-19 not having any end in sight, Republicans in the Senate are following the example of the toddler in chief and getting back to the business of what they’re best at; not doing shit and trying to hand vast sums of wealth to rich people for not doing shit.
While you, me, and everyone else has wondered when we’ll get stimulus checks again, Senate Republicans have more or less said giving Americans direct aid ever again is a non-starter in negotiations, as Republicans understand that proving the government is actually quite effective when it wants to be would be disastrous for literally their entire platform. Instead, Senate Majority Leader and long lost Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Mitch McConnell has indicated he supports two things that will absolutely not help anyone suffering in this economy at all.
McConnell has suggested that any future stimulus has to be tied to work requirements, which makes tons of sense giving that the economy is shedding jobs and we’re seeing unemployment rates we haven’t seen since the Great Depression. Oh wait…wait a minute…yup that makes no sense. Tying aid to work when there aren’t any jobs to return to seems kind of cruel and unusual, when you think about it! These same requirements to finding work when there isn’t any is part of what has made filing for and receiving unemployment insurance the bane of many Americans’ existence.
These are people who, quite literally through no fault of their own, are unable to work, not because they don’t want to, but because they quite simply can’t. Even as states rush to re-open, many are only allowing places like office buildings to operate at half their capacity. Still many other people will simply not be able to return to the jobs they had at all. The drive to tie future stimulus to being able to work is meant to do two things. First, it’s meant to force people who would otherwise contain to quarantine at home to re-enter the work force and possibly get infected, a move that Republicans seem to think will fix the economy (or rather, will make unemployment numbers look slightly less terrible as we head into a crucial election season). And second, it will save the government some money so the Republicans can divert it to where they really want it go; rich ass fucking corporations.
Getting back to that first point about forcing people to go back to work, McConnell has also stated that his redline is liability insurance for businesses, so employees can’t sue their employers for making them work during the pandemic. And yes, that is exactly as evil as you think it sounds. Possibly more so!
In addition, the White House and President Trump have signaled that they will veto any legislation that does not include a payroll tax cut. Let’s go to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to explain why that’s a bad idea!
Cutting the employee share of payroll taxes gives the most help (in dollar terms) to higher earners, who are less likely to need the help or to spend most or all of the extra money. Compounding the weaknesses of this approach, it does less for those with lower earnings and nothing at all for people who have lost jobs.
And cutting employer payroll taxes is an ineffective way to shore up business hiring and investment. Business’ main problem now is lack of customers for their products — both because of social distancing measures and because many customers’ incomes have fallen dramatically as unemployment has risen. Businesses will not hire (or retain) more workers or invest in more equipment than they need to produce the goods and services they can actually sell.
Center for Budget and Policy Priorities
In essence, all a payroll tax cut would be is yet another tax cut for the wealthiest among us and for corporations. A payroll tax cut, naturally, wouldn’t help the unemployed at all (did I mention that Senate Republicans also don’t want to extend the $600 per week bonus to unemployment funds past July), and would barely make a scratch on lower-to-middle class essential workers. On the employer side, most large businesses and corporations would be far more likely to horde the extra cash than to use it to hire people and raise wages.
The entire point of stimulus payments is to provide Americans with the funds they need to survive. People with money are more likely to go out and spend that money, pumping money back into the economy, making the businesses more money, which they can then use to pay employees and potentially expand jobs.
But Republicans refuse to acknowledge this truth. In their reckless, ill-informed and greedy understanding of economics, the only way to get back to growth and a stable economy is by screwing the underclass while providing funds to the oligarchs. This plan always fucking backfires. The economy always suffers when Conservatives funnel money to the wealthy. Literally every fucking time. It’s not that trickle down economics doesn’t work; it’s that it doesn’t fucking exist. It’s an Ayn Rand pipe dream, a falsehood clung onto by people too fucking dumb to realize spending 2 dollars today can make them 10 dollars in the future.
It’s a goddamn Ferengi’s view of how economics should work. (TNG Ferengi, not DS9 Ferengi.)
So that’s where we stand; the economy is in freefall with no signs of stopping, the rate of infections haven’t gone down, the states that have most aggressively moved to re-open in attempt to appease Donald Trump restart the economy are seeing their hospitals fill up more quickly than they can free up beds, we still don’t have enough toilet paper, and the Republicans are getting back to doing the only shit they’re good at; helping the wealthy profit in the short term, while fucking over everyone else in the long term.
If the pandemic temporarily put shit in perspective for Republicans, that has long since gone away.
soooo….same as it ever was then?
the poor are gonna die and the rich get slightly less rich till this all blows over and theres a new batch of poors to use
Sort of. From today’s DOT:
the only joy i take from that is that i know bezos is one of them
and thats gotta piss off turnip
That IS a happy thought. I like it.
Although, I agree with everything you said – Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Michelangelo would never ever allow Bitch McConnell to join the team. Never. Ever.
I didn’t say he was a *good* TMNT.
“It’s not that trickle down economics doesn’t work; it’s that it doesn’t fucking exist.”
This. All day and every day, this. I am so fucking tired of idiots proclaiming that giving money to the “job producers” is a good idea. They don’t increase staff — they fucking bank the damn money, usually offshore somewhere. They treat is as windfall profits and sock it away. They don’t buy more stuff — they’ve already got ALL THE STUFF. They don’t give it away; they hoard it like Smaug the Dragon sitting on a pile of gold and barbecuing cheeky-ass hobbits. Even during the Reagan era when I was a dumb-ass kid, I could spot the flaw in that argument.
The simple truth is that the mega-wealthy don’t contribute in any meaningful way to the economy unless they are heavily taxed. Period.
If you don’t compel the wealthy to contribute to the economy through taxes, they just won’t fucking do it. Just like if there aren’t laws on the books to force companies to hire diverse staffs, they won’t do it. If you don’t institute child labor laws, little Johnny is going to work in the coal mine the second he is able to understand object permanence.
I was an economics major in college during the Reagan administration at a pretty conservative university (not the University of Chicago; that’s where a lot of this thinking came from and was promulgated, and that belief system is known as “The Chicago School.”) Even at my university, while these debates were happening and tax cuts and The Laffer Curve and everything else was all over the news, I don’t think a single one of my professors believed a word of it. In one of my classes we had a mouthy Reaganaut who finally snapped (ah, the self-assuredness of an arrogant 20-year-old) who asked the professor what he did believe. This class met two days a week for 75 minutes and we were just starting this session. The professor replied, “I am a Neo-Keynesian, and since you asked, I’m jumping ahead a little bit and that’s what we’ll be discussing today.” I loved him; I asked him to be my academic advisor. He put up with no bullshit. I ended up doing absolutely nothing related to economics directly but I got a great education out of him, I took six classes with him out of about 20 altogether, it was a very rigorous program with few opportunities for non-major-related electives.
Reagan has been out of office for over thirty years, and people are still going on about this shit…
They made a 1 trillion bailout to big corps. a trillion is fucking huge. There is something like ~350 million people in the U.S. If you gave every person – every single fucking person, including children and infants $3,000, that would come out to just over $1 trillion, and it would do the country, and the economy a lot of fucking good. And the banks and corps will still get that money, it will just take them a couple weeks.
Our government is literally pushing people into unemployment, homelessness, and even death, because the greedy fucking corps can’t wait a couple weeks for their handout.
Sometimes I wish I were religious so that I could believe there was a hell for these evil assholes to burn in…
A little off topic but not so much when you think about this really starting with Reagan, I didn’t realize a group went out to fix Reagan’s reputation after he left office (I heard about it on the radio but can’t find the name of the group). They got every state to name something after him and rehabilitated his image. He was the MOST corrupt president until our current occupant if you look at how many of his staff went to jail. I was searching for more info on this subject and fell into this…
https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2018/05/17/the-miraculous-image-rehabilitation-of-former-republican-presidents-n2481335
This kind of goes along with this subject
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-objective-reasons-ronald-reagan-was-our-worst-president/
I didn’t learn until grad school that not only did David Stockman not believe in the economic policies he was putting together for Reagan, but he couldn’t believe Reagan was falling for it, either. At one point he was pushing some really brutal stuff just to see how far Reagan was willing to go, and Reagan’s take was “Sure, why not?”
The similarities between Reagan and Trump are quite staggering.
Especially the dementia aspects.
Reagan had much better handlers…
This just reminded me of the time when I think I got an “A” on an assignment for English class in high school because I had to define the word “irony”, and I pointed out the irony of the President who fired all the air traffic controllers having a fucking airport named after him.
I have no idea where I read that about Reagan now that I’m 33. I’m pretty sure that was in 10th grade. It must have been in a book or something and I had to be looking for examples of irony, but this is pre-“I can just Google this shit”.
I rarely am proud of my younger self, but I think I can give myself a golf clap for that.
I should have known it was Grover Norquist that was behind this evil shit!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Ronald_Reagan
Ah man, Iran Contra told us everything we needed to know about fucking Reagan. I will never get over that. Never.
Wow I didn’t know that. I’m already bracing for shit getting named after Trump in my part of the country, at least. It’s been a while but I have a history of vandalism I’ll be happy to revive.
The puzzling question is why, from a political (as opposed to a “sucking up to corporate overlords”) perspective, is the GOP taking such an unpopular position? Here’s the best I can come up with: either
(a) to force people to go back to work so they can claim that the economy is “recovered” by November; or
(b) they have given up on winning any segment of the popular vote beyond their ignorant base, and they will rely on voter suppression and the impact of COVID-19 on the minority population to remain in power.
Either way, they have ended any pretense of compassion or concern for people who have been made sick and unemployed by the coronavirus.
That’s what grinding my gears.
It’s such an easy, political lay-up and an easy way to score points on Democrats who call them obstructionist to be like “sure, let’s do another stimulus, let’s do as many stimulus as needed”, so that they can turn around and say “we were the ones who gave you money when the Democrats couldn’t.”
I think you’re right; I think they’ve given up on any sort of coherent political strategy and are just counting on suppressing the vote as much as humanly possible and hoping enough people of color die to help them squeak by. They’ve ceased playing checkers or chess. They’ve flipped over the board and scribbled “fuck everyone” across it.
It won’t just be obstruction, it will be outright cheating, hacking, just not counting ballots from places they don’t want to count. If somehow that doesn’t work, they will say the Dems cheated and won’t validate the election.
Spoiler alert: It’s B.
It’s the second one.
They are certainly acting like they don’t need to bother to win this election.
I am trying to decide if they honestly believe they’d lose voters if they were handing people cash right now. Are they that out of touch? They KNOW the economy won’t be “recovered” by November if there is a virus raging and people are dying left and right. The unemployment rate (and the family earners dying) has meant tons and tons of people are losing health insurance – and Democrats consistently have the edge on healthcare. Like, why aren’t they clamoring to hand cash out to people with Trump’s name on it right before an election?
Are they that out of touch? Or do they not need to care anymore?
They don’t care, because it doesn’t make their oligarch overseers any $$$
If it doesn’t make the rich donors bank, they see no need for it, plain & simple.😕
Fucking Trump just went on TV & demanded all states make churches essential businesses and opened. He said if they don’t, he will and walked off without answering questions. WTF?
Essential businesses should have to pay taxes, no?
Would his list of essential churches include mosques?
Surprisingly he brought up mosques a bunch of times.
I mean, the upshot is that Trump 1.) can’t and 2.) won’t do anything about it.
(Shrieks of demented laughter) And if he does try to do something about it, he’ll hire a food truck driver from bumfuck Montana to implement it, and it will be a complete disaster before it even starts because the food truck driver knows nothing about anything that has anything to do with the actual job at hand. All the money that was supposed to go for it will somehow disappear down a rabbit hole and no one will be able to ever trace it ever again, and he will claim not to know the food truck driver or any of his employees and everyone will just accept that as real. See, I don’t even listen to the news anymore, and I can tell you exactly what will happen.
Let this shit rampage through some congregations.
Donations from the grifters running those churches, Shaq…
They funnel PLENTY of money into Trump’s personal piggyba….
I mean, “His Campaign Fund”
Grifters gonna grift.
I kind of believe the Trump administration will see the writing on the wall about this come July; they won’t want to do anything genuinely helpful, but they will likely want to throw another Trump-signed check at people as the situation becomes more desperate. With the CARES Act, the Senate was fully unwilling to do jack shit, then if you recall they passed a bogus shitty act, then it was Mnuchin and the WH who mamde them come to the table after the House Dems did some real work. IIRC, Mnuchin even met with Pelosi and McCarthy without McConnell a few times.
There are lots of companies laying off people with “real” jobs, as this drags on – not just the people they view as discardable trash in the retail and service sectors. Regardless of how those people view the virus, they will indeed need help, and they will see their leaders refuse to help them. Trump will rewrite the story and deflect blame, but the bottom line will be the same. It only takes a few to become angry at him. He won by the skin of his teeth.