Michael Goldfarb on Facebook:

(Trigger warning, racial epithets used ironically in this post)
So much to say about the US tax bill, so little time to say it and not sure whether the people who get to see this when it’s first posted here in London will understand.
What happened yesterday was the end of a forty year process of undoing the tax code that underwrote America’s meagre social democratic safety net. Starve the beast has been the mantra of the ideological, anti-progress GOP going back to Reagan.
The beast, the government, takes from you to give to the n-words and free-school meals & edcuation to the illegal spics and to Planned Parenthood and to the undeserving who did

The Times editorial board on last night’s theft:

With barely a vote to spare early Saturday morning, the Senate passed a tax bill confirming that the Republican leaders’ primary goal is to enrich the country’s elite at the expense of everybody else, including future generations who will end up bearing the cost. The approval of this looting of the public purse by corporations and the wealthy makes it a near certainty that President Trump will sign this or a similar bill into law in the coming days.

Starve the beast. Government is the enemy. Yadda yadda.

Because the Senate was rewriting its bill till the last minute, only the dealmakers themselves knew what the chamber voted on. There will,

More from Robert Reich:

The True Path to Prosperity

It’s often thought that Democrats care about fairness and not economic growth, while Republicans care about growth even at the cost of some fairness.

Rubbish. Growth and fairness aren’t opposites. In reality, Democrats are the party of economic growth and fairness. Republicans are the party of neither.

The only way to grow the economy is by investing in the education, healthcare, and infrastructure that average Americans need in order to be more productive. Growth doesn’t “trickle down.” It rises up.

Consider the two biggest legislative initiatives over past decade – the Affordable Care Act, achieved without a single Republican vote, and the current Trump-Republican tax overhaul, speeding ahead without a

Robert Reich:

The next time you hear Trump or Republicans in Congress claim they are for American workers remember this vote. Their tax plan is one of the biggest bait-and-switches in modern American politics.

UPDATE: Democrats just offered an amendment to ensure corporations use their tax savings to raise employee wages at the same rate they increase executive pay, stock buybacks and dividends to shareholders. Every single Republican voting, voted NO. #GOPTaxPlan

— Senator Dianne Feinstein (@SenFeinstein) November 30, 2017

Sen Dianne Feinstein‏
@SenFeinstein
Nov 30

UPDATE: Democrats just offered an amendment to ensure corporations use their tax savings to raise employee wages at the same rate they increase executive pay, stock buybacks and dividends to shareholders. Every single

The Republicans are doing tax deform so that they can shunt more money to the rich, because…what, the rich aren’t rich enough? The poor aren’t poor enough? We don’t have an extreme enough gap between the richest 1% and everyone else? Is that how things are?

Fortune interviewed Richard Florida on the subject last summer.

When did this wealth gap problem start?
Basically, this wealth gap that we see today is something that has really skyrocketed since about the 1980s and certainly in the past decade, decade and a half.

How bad is the wealth inequality we’re seeing in the United States?
The income inequality in the United States, according to the Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality where 0

Dexter Filkins at the New Yorker looks at Tillerson’s demolition of the State Department.

In only ten months, Tillerson, the former C.E.O. of ExxonMobil, has presided over the near-dismantling of America’s diplomatic corps, chasing out hundreds of State Department employees and scaling back the country’s engagement with the world. Most alarming has been the departure of dozens of the foreign service’s most senior officials—men and women who had spent their careers living and working abroad, who speak several languages, and who are experts in their fields. As I detailed in my recent Profile of Tillerson, he came into the job proposing to cut the State Department’s budget by a third, with plans to eliminate more than a thousand

Stan Collender at Forbes:

If it’s enacted, the GOP tax cut now working its way through Congress will be the start of a decades-long economic policy disaster unlike any other that has occurred in American history.

There’s no economic justification whatsoever for a tax cut at this time. U.S. GDP is growing, unemployment is close to 4 percent (below what is commonly considered “full employment“), corporate profits are at record levels and stock markets are soaring. It makes no sense to add any federal government-induced stimulus to all this private sector-caused economic activity, let alone a tax cut as big as this one.

But they’re not doing it as stimulus, they’re doing it to make very rich people … Read the rest

A historian of the Depression points out that this “make the rich richer” approach to taxation has been tried before.

The crash followed a decade of Republican control of the federal government during which trickle-down policies, including massive tax cuts for the rich, produced the greatest concentration of income in the accounts of the richest 0.01 percent at any time between World War I and 2007 (when trickle-down economics, tax cuts for the hyper-rich, and deregulation again resulted in another economic collapse).

Yet the plain fact that the trickle-down approach has never worked leaves Republicans unfazed. The GOP has been singing from the Market-is-God hymnal for well over a century, telling us that deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and

Sarah Huckabee Sanders says fake shmake, who cares, the point is, Mooslims are A THREAT and that’s what Trump was saying when he retweeted three grotesque videos on the theme of LOOK OUT MOOSLIMS LOOK OUT THEY WILL EAT US ALL.

The White House has defended the unverified, Islamophobic videos that Donald Trump shared as driving home an important point – regardless of if they are real or not.

“Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters. “His goal is to promote strong border security and strong national security.”

What threat is very real? That Mooslims will grab all the statues of “the Virgin Mary” and smash them before our disbelieving … Read the rest