Remembering just a little of where the modern American fascist mindset and inspiration comes from: The slain military are “suckers” and “losers.” “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” .... Rank and file supporters are “disgusting people” he was happy to not have to shake hands with due to the pandemic. “The people T**** despises most love him the most. .... The ex-president comments: “Look at these people. It’s literally a little bit sad.”
Heads I win, tails you lose. That is Republicans’ ominous warning to Democrats working to design and (to their credit!) actually pay for an infrastructure bill.
“I think the Trojan horse will be called infrastructure, but inside the Trojan horse will be all the tax increases,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said this week. “They want to raise taxes across the board.”
For those struggling to decode these comments, here’s the trap McConnell is laying.
Any major upgrade of America’s roads, bridges, broadband network, water systems and other infrastructure will be expensive. That’s part of the reason “Infrastructure Week,” though much hyped in recent years, still hasn’t happened, despite the obvious need for more infrastructure investment and the popularity of such proposals. If Democrats try to undertake this expensive project without paying for it, Republicans will no doubt accuse them of running up the debt and thereby stoking out-of-control inflation.
How do we know? Because that’s the critique McConnell and other Republicans levied against the recently enacted $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Not a single Republican voted for the bill because, they said, they were concerned about “adding all this money to the national debt” (per McConnell), since unfunded spending of that magnitude would “unleash inflation” (South Dakota Sen. John Thune). Deficit-financed spending would “pour gasoline on the inflationary fires” (Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley) and ultimately lead to a “day of reckoning” (Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson). Republicans made similar arguments a decade ago, too, when refusing to support President Barack Obama’s plans for combating the Great Recession.
Today, Democrats are addressing concerns about debt and inflation risks by brainstorming ways to pay for their ambitious infrastructure plans — likely through increases to individual and corporate income taxes. Anticipating this, Republicans have preemptively accused Democrats of using infrastructure as a “Trojan horse” for tax hikes. By this twisted logic, tax increases are Democrats’ secret ends, not merely the means for paying for stuff that Republicans demand be paid for.
According to Republicans, a big spending program such as an infrastructure bill can’t be financed by deficits, and it can’t be financed by new revenue. Presumably the only option left is to cut spending on Medicaid or Social Security or some other popular safety-net program Republicans have long salivated over slashing. But in the (extremely unlikely) event Democrats ever proposed such cuts, Republicans would clearly use that against them in attack ads, too.
Republicans have, of course, adopted a different strategy when pushing through their own fiscal priorities — such as the 2017 tax cut, which added nearly $2 trillion to the deficit. They didn’t bother trying to come up with offsets because they promised that the policy would “pay for itself” through gangbusters economic growth. This growth never materialized. In recent years Democrats have sometimes toyed with their own version of this voodoo economics, and they should be praised when they resist the temptation. This is what they seem to be doing now, in contemplating at least partial pay-fors for both infrastructure and other priorities. (emphasis added)
Going forward, there will be no good will, no good faith, no honesty and no compromise from the radical republican authoritarians that now control the fascist GOP (FGOP). There will be endless divisive dark free speech. The entire FGOP leadership goal is winning power and exercising it. The terrifying end goal is concentrating power and wealth among insider elites and wealthy in-group White people and businesses. The FGOP really does want to get rid of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, welfare and most or all other domestic spending, also including most public health and pandemic spending.
Their sacred solution and ideology is replacement of distributed power and wealth under democracy and the rule of law and replacing it with concentrated power and wealth under some form of authoritarian anti-democratic White Christian Nationalist kleptocracy operating in the name of laissez-faire capitalism.
One can argue that what we have now does not constitute distributed power and wealth. That may be partly or mostly true. It depends on how one defines the concepts. But what we have now will look like semi-utopia compared to their vicious final solution. It will be imposed and maintained by a minority using brute force, not by majority democratic consensus.
How some (most?) on the right falsely sees the threat based on
endless radical right conservative propaganda
What the real threat looks like, part 1
What the real threat looks like, part 2
Fascist US senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) was not concerned:
“Had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and
those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters,
I might have been a little concerned.”
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