"Nothing is certain, except Death and Taxes" -- Benjamin Franklin.
I usually dislike having to disagree with monster intellects like Ol' Ben's, but his thought is incomplete.
Probably because he didn't live in a country that was overflowing with cretins.
They're talking about taxes in Washington, D.C., again, and, as usual, before anything is even agreed to, put on paper, or voted on, the Tail-End Charlie of the Trinity of Certainties has made his anticipated appearance, right on schedule.
It seems no one can float a trial balloon, make a suggestion, spitball an idea in America surrounding the concept of taxation, that there isn't a smirking douchebag on the air someplace 15 seconds later to denounce it as "a giveaway to the rich".
My first thought, always, upon hearing the "Tax Cuts for the Rich!" mantra is "Wow, I wonder how they managed to do the math that fast?".
I mean, someone MUST be doing it, in real time, all the time, day and night, 365 days a year, neither rain, nor snow, nor heat, nor gloom of night (Mr.Franklin is credited with this, too, but it's really Herodotus) shall stay these couriers of fucktard from their appointed rounds on (P)MSNBC and CNN. It's physically IMPOSSIBLE for someone to calculate the potential effects of a suggestion on a system as complex as the American Economy and Tax Collection System so quickly and with such certainty, and so you have to figure that the Talking Heads just have a bunch of stock talking points and plug in made up numbers, and slant their monologue according to their political leanings.
One of these stock talking points the Pink Panty Party always trots out is that any form of tax reform ALWAYS "hurts the poor and working families" (incidentally, "working family" is a euphemism for "household led by nose-picking-minimum-wage-reprobate collecting public assistance").
This is my All Time Favorite Piece of Goebbels-like Boilerplate Gibberish uttered by lefties (what can I say? I enjoy The Classics): someone is always making the nonsense argument that cutting taxes on the richest people in America is a burden borne by people who don't pay taxes to begin with, and who are usually the recipients of that tax money.
In effect, you're saying that cutting off the supply of free money to someone who didn't earn it is a cardinal sin.
What's next? We make arguments that taking heroin away from the addicts is a crime on par with The Rape of Nanking?.
It's a thing of beauty, this argument: it appeals to the emotions; it smells of Marx; it's impossible to prove or disprove empirically; and no one is going to bother to fact check it.
It's also bullshit. Mostly because that "extra" money that now isn't being stolen at figurative gunpoint wasn't going to "the poor" or "working families"; it was going to bureaucrats who "administrate" the Welfare State; it was finding it's way into the campaign coffers of democrats by various and sundry back-channel means; it was funding everything from your local political activist group to the smiling dickhead on TV who's just implied that to be rich is a crime worse than any committed by Hitler.
Lower taxes don't hurt "poor" people (we don't have "poor people" in America: we have fat, ignorant, functionally-illiterate, lazy, immoral people who live a subsidized lifestyle that keeps them from dying in the streets in inconvenient numbers, or rioting).
They have poor people in Vietnam; they have poor people in India; they have people so poor in Africa that the flies won't buzz around or lay eggs in the running sores in their eyes, lest their little fly friends see them "slumming".
That's poverty.
It's difficult to position yourself as "poor" when you live in a government-subsidized apartment with indoor plumbing, heat, air conditioning, a cell phone, gold teeth, neck tats, and enough food stamp "money" every month to feed a Bangladeshi village for a year, and receive cash assistance and a "child care credit" for each of your 12 children by 19 potential fathers just for putting your name on a 1040 EZ that doesn't have a W-2 stapled to it.
Poor people? I think not.
Another Classic-well-worn-well-tooled-anti-tax-cut argument made every day is that any potential cut always results in someone dying. Children starve; the elderly die for lack of care; The Government stops inspecting chicken for salmonella with the naked eye (because this is how they actually do it) resulting in a Holocaust of Rampant Diarrhea. It's as if by threatening to take away a dollar that Government is accustomed to wasting,anyway, you've unleashed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the land goes fallow, the flowers refuse to bloom, the seas boil, and the Sun becomes as black as sackcloth, presaging an Age of Dystopian Mass Mortality where the Grand Order of Everything is abruptly overturned, the Earth stops spinning, the Universe comes to a screeching halt, and you're late for work because you've spent extra time carefully stepping over or around the piled corpses.
Frankly, I'm of the mind that there are already segments of the population that SHOULD die of starvation and lack of care, and if The Government can't use 21st Century methods to detect potentially-deadly pathogens on my chicken nuggets then maybe it shouldn't be inspecting anything to begin with. To read the news the last few years, with the weekly outbreaks of e coli and the Hepatitis A all over the West Coast urban areas,it's obvious The Government isn't doing it's job, anyway.
In fact, you can probably trace those outbreaks to government policy; the listeria you got at Chipotle is probably due to the fact that your lettuce is picked or your meat ground by illegal immigrants who can't even spell "hygiene" let alone follow it's dictates. If you visit San Diego and return with Hep A, it's only because in effort to not embarrass "The Homeless" local government decided it was better to let them defecate in the streets.
If that's how tax money is being spent -- to clean up after disastrous government policy -- then perhaps withholding that money from The Government might get them to fucking THINK about the consequences of their stupidity before they write it into law (or worse, fail to enforce the laws they've already written).
And then there's the conveniently selective memory of the average leftist, who, having decried "George Bush's Tax Cuts for the Rich" trotted out an Affirmative Action hire who vowed to "cut taxes for 95% of the American people" and failed spectacularly for total lack of effort, but who insisted he succeeded anyway, because in his world every retard gets a trophy for participation.
A lack of effort that lasted 8 years, I might add, and resulted in the Individual Mandate...a tax INCREASE. Among others. And the last time I looked, Barack Obama increased his own wealth by some 16 times during that period, and the Clinton Foundation somehow managed to snag $150 million in "donations".
What was that about "the rich getting richer"?
If you needed a graphic illustration of what is wrong with the American Tax System, I would recommend an afternoon spent watching Judge Judy.
Just about every day on that program, we are treated to a case in which some scumbag of a particular socio-economic class is trying to sue another scumbag of the same class for the return of money laid out in anticipation of repayment "when my tax return arrives". Judge Judy then asks a few, pointed questions, and we discover the defendant is usually on welfare, does not work, has never worked, does not in fact, pay taxes, is somehow receiving "student aid" that they use to pay for cars they don't insure and then get into accidents with, lives on their child's disability payments, has no other source of income except maybe child support from a deadbeat who makes his payments so infrequently that a unicorn sighting is a workaday event, by comparison.
And somehow they're always well-fed (morbidly obese), covered in tats, sporting gold teeth and expensive wigs, and wearing the latest in Ghetto Chic or Trailer Park Formalwear (this might consist of un-ripped overalls with a designer's name on them, and a MAGA hat). and guess what? They're usually handing their iPhone to the bailiff to submit evidence collected in text messages, too. So, there's apparently enough money in being totally unproductive and a leech for the latest tech and 4G communications, to boot.
Fuck "The Poor". They've had it too good for too long at the expense of The Rich. If anything, the level of material comfort and personal safety our "poor" enjoy is a testament to the strength, resiliency and productive capacity of the Capitalist system: we have and make so much we can afford TO GIVE IT AWAY (so long as it's suitably laundered through four layers of government).
So, let's sum up, shall we?
Cutting taxes is GOOD. The empirical evidence for it is indisputable, and is so well-known that to repeat it here is a waste of bandwidth.
People who don't pay taxes, and who's only use in life is to vote themselves other people's tax money as slaves of the democratic party, should shut the fuck up. If you'd like your opinion to count on this topic, then pay income taxes. I understand this means getting a job and not smoking pot and not spending your days conceiving children you can't feed, so if you don't step up understand that no one gives a fuck what you have to say.
Some kids deserve to starve, the little bastards. The elderly are often a drain on scarce resources, and very often investment in their care is a waste of money; there is no amount of Medicare that can fix 90/Diabetic/Kidney Failure/Blind/Incontinent/Dementia that gets a decent return on investment (i.e. a productive taxpayer), and doing so is ridiculous. If you tell me someone useless dies because of a tax cut, then I'm all for it. Sign me up.
Spare me the sanctimony and virtue signalling of positioning yourself as the champion of the downtrodden. After 50 years of hearing the same arguments repeated ad nauseum, and comparing the Statements to experience of the results, I know you're full of shit. Six decades of extremely-expensive "anti-poverty" policy that has required ever-rising levels of taxation for no result, has turned poverty into a full-time profession (especially for unionized bureaucrats), rather than a circumstance, and it's about time we stopped funding it.
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