So we have finally decided to leave Afghanistan. It’s about time we made a good move in foreign policy. The best result of this move seems to be China’s interest in replacing us. They have already gotten deeply involved in the business of Afghanistan and are quickly making connections in all the political areas.
It seems China has learned nothing from either our, or the Russian, experience in that pathetically dysfunctional nation. It will be interesting to see how many dead Chinese and how much gold will go into the toilet called Afghanistan before the Chinese learn the lesson that both the Russians and ourselves have so painfully absorbed.
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I have always loved living in NYC but never more than last Thursday when the City of New York filed suit against three oil giants and an industry group that lies for them. The defendants were BPI, Mobile Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell and The American Petroleum Institute, a fancy name for a cadre of lobbyists.
The suit accuses; the oil group, “has systematically and intentionally mislead consumers,” by misrepresenting their fuels as, “cleaner” and “emission reducing,” despite not disclosing their true environmental effect.
As expected, spokesmen for the various defendants have whined against the suit, lying about the reality of their employers’ wildly profitable attempts to poison the planet.
Good for NYC and an added peck on the governmental cheek for filing the suit on Earth Day.
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Joe Biden and his associates have already taken the big dive opting for infrastructure, affordable housing, energy efficiency, free college and guaranteed healthcare but they are all going to cost money and no one is trying to deny this. This is not like Trump’s tax bill for the rich, which all the Republicans accepted because they said it would create “trickle down” benefits. Those are benefits, by the way, for which we are still searching. So now the Democrats are going to develop those benefits and they are going to pay for them, which the GOP never did. I know you’re dying to know how, so just take a look.
1-We’ll start with prescription drug prices. The pharmaceutical industry has been ripping off the American public for years, charging Americans the highest prices, by far, in the world. With the institution of single payer or universal healthcare, Medicare or the government will be able to negotiate fair drug prices with the big drug companies. The savings could reasonably run to $456 billion over the next ten years.
2-For years, American familial wealth has been protected and allowed to build to enormous size by inheritance protections that allow many millions to be transferred from one generation to another without the payment of inheritance taxes. Instituting an inheritance tax rate of 45% on everything over $3.5 million would raise over $1 trillion in new revenue from America’s 724 billionaire families. We all know the objection to this. The billionaire inheritors will whine about being taxed twice on the same money, and that may be true but it’s not money they earned so they should be happy to get whatever they do, considering they didn’t have to work for any of it.
3-Wall Street and the financial community have long been infamous for making huge sums of money without creating any kind of functional product. They are also guilty of causing the most recent economic disasters so it’s time they are made to pay their fair share of the cost of America. That could at least partially be represented by a financial transaction tax on the trades of stocks, bonds and derivatives. A progressive tax with a top of a little as 0.05% on each trade could raise over $2.2 trillion over the next decade.
And finally there’s the money we throw away on our most destructive of all industries, fossil fuel. Right now we have an industry, much like tobacco once was, that is poisoning the land, choking its people and destroying the planet but our GOP legislators, unafraid to display their fealty to wealth are busy creating tax loopholes, subsidies, and special interest gifts to the gas, oil and coal industries, a system that if abolished, would quickly lead to the collapse of the fossil fuel industry and its replacement by safer and cleaner renewables. It would also add hundreds of billions to our national larder over the next decade.
Do the math! With just these few changes we will be able to pay for the new infrastructure bill and a couple of others. With just these few changes plus adding a real and collected corporate tax, we will be able to set America on a stable course leading to a fair, functional economic roadmap that will enhance the lives of most Americans without doing any real damage to those who currently hold most of the wealth of the nation. It’s a win/win if only America’s greediest and their bought and paid for legislators can see their way clear to do the right thing before they are disappeared.
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Watched S.C. Cupp talk about how she couldn’t have a debate on climate change because the Left just tells the Right that it is too stupid to discuss it. Actually there’s a lot to be said for that. Hard to see why she thinks it’s a bad thing. She may not like it but the problem with her position is she wants those in favor of dealing with the climate to take seriously those who just want to stamp their feet and say that burning coal is good for the planet, she has a long way to go to generate sympathy.
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GOP strategist Sara Fagen recently made an interesting statement on This Week, when she claimed that the differences between the Right and the Left’s plans on taxation was only about how each wanted to help America. That sounds cute but it’s just another GOP obfuscation. The difference in economic planning is generally about whom you want to help. Do we as a nation want to give a helping hand to a bunch of millionaires and billionaires who are already rich or do we want to help the average working stiff who puts in forty fifty or sixty hours a week and still needs food stamps to feed his family?
That discussion came on the heels of Chris Christie spending a whole segment lying about Biden, something he’s been doing too much of lately. This time it was about how Biden’s plans would affect capital gains and how treating them fairly would hurt the average Joe, rather than the average rich guy. We all know that Stephanopoulos has no balls but he really has to step in once in a while on his own show and blow the whistle on obvious lies.
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Joe Biden addressed congress on Wednesday night and laid out a series of programs that brought us all the way back to FDR. It was exciting, exhilarating and for the GOP, very scary. They immediately started whining about big government and Socialism. The problem they have is that before he made this speech Biden demonstrated what a big efficient Democratic government could do when given their head. First he delivered 220 million COVID shots into arms in the time he had promised to deliver only 100 million, a time frame the GOP had scoffed at because their only experience at delivering anything recently has been through the stumble bums working for Trump. In his first 100 days Biden has delivered the COVID shots, put together bills that now amount to almost 8 trillion dollars in nation building legislation and warned the rest of the world that we are back and not to screw with us.
Yes, there’s no question, this is big government and it’s exactly what this nation needs because this is a big nation. If you want to play Fooze Ball, run for office in Lichtenstein. We need serious people to accomplish serious work, work that hasn’t been attempted since LBJ wandered the halls of the White House. Work that hasn’t been accomplished since FDR remade this country into the successful juggernaut that beat the depression, won WWII and built this nation into the world leader that tiny men like Trump and McConnell have been trying to tear down ever since.
Biden knows how to do this stuff and he has built a team that is as functional as its predecessors were incompetent. The GOP has nothing to say. They put Tim Scott, a non-functional fool, up to contend Biden’s explosive darts and he ended up a train wreck. Now it’s time for those Progressives who aren’t satisfied with the speed at which Biden is moving to shut their mouths and concentrate on doing something constructive themselves. Biden is moving at blinding speed if you contrast his moves with those of his last few predecessors. If he can get even a little cooperation from Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who wants to be Manchin, along with a couple of Republicans who have retained some slim ounce of functional stability, he just might be able to put us back where we belong, leading the world towards a brighter future. It takes big government to do a big job. The GOP just doesn’t get that because they are small people with small minds.