Why the GOP wants to destroy Zoomers last chance for the American dream

[Zeedox]

Why the GOP wants to destroy Zoomers last chance for the American dream

Is it just that they’re evil?Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was pulling no punches in calling out her six Republican colleagues on the Supreme Court in the student loan case, Biden v Nebraska. None of the Republican states suing would have lost a penny had Biden’s student loan forgiveness...

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But Republicans were worried about all this middle-class prosperity and what it would mean for the country.

Russell Kirk published his 1951 book The Conservative Mind, arguing that without clearly defined “classes and power structures” — essentially without the morbidly rich in complete control — society would devolve into chaos.

The middle class growing as rapidly as it was, Kirk and his colleagues warned, was a threat to the social and thus political stability of America. It threatened the American experiment, because middle class people just didn’t have the class sensibilities, the upbringing, the education to handle the kind of wealth they were being handed by all those good union jobs and the social safety net that backed them up.

If not stopped, Kirk and his acolytes warned, disaster was imminent. Not just disaster for rich people: disaster for all Americans.

Suddenly, Russell Kirk didn’t look like a crackpot anymore. He looked more like a prophet.

The wise elders of the GOP — the morbidly rich — and Kirk’s and Buckley’s conservatives who’d been warning for decades that the New Deal would end in disaster needed a plan.

Tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell put together his infamous Memo outlining a way to guarantee the “survival of what we call the free enterprise system” in 1971; President Richard Nixon put him on the Supreme Court in 1972; he authored the Bellotti decision — that overturned the 1907 Tillman Act and thus let billionaires and corporations pour virtually unlimited amounts of “free speech” money into politics — in 1978.

Nixon’s “War on Drugs” designed to get the antiwar hippies and “uppity” Blacks under control was spreading across America like rot on an orange; prison populations were exploding, as the days of peace and love turned into heroin, meth, and violence. Hell’s Angels and the murders at Altamont in 1969 signaled the end of the era.

Thus, by the 1970s, the die was cast. The middle class had to go. FDR’s “Great Experiment,” Republicans believed, was over and it was up to them to put the country back together again.

First, he went after the main source of working-class wealth, which coincidentally funded the Democratic Party: unions. Roughly one in three American workers was a union member, and two-thirds of Americans had the equivalent of a union job because unions set local wage and benefit floors.

One of Reagan’s first actions was to destroy one of only three unions that had supported his presidency, the PATCO group of unionized air traffic controllers.

Shifting that middle class wealth working people had accumulated since the 1940s into the money bins of the elite classes who knew how to properly run a country — after all, Reagan’s men would tell you, they’d been doing it for thousands of years — he cut the top income tax bracket down to 27 percent and drilled so many loopholes in the tax code that today the average American billionaire pays 3.4 percent in income taxes.

He raised taxes on average working people 18 times, ended the deductibility of credit card interest used exclusively by the middle class, and cut Social Security by raising the retirement age to 67 and making its benefits taxable.

 

[Gomez Adams]

And they're trying to remove interest on mortgages from being deductible as well. We also have to pay taxes on valuation of our house even when we don't have that money, yet Elon Musk doesn't pay a penny of tax on his Tesla stock until he sells it even though his entire income and lifestyle are paid by loans based on that value.