Senator Rick Scott from Florida, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and professional Lex Luthor cosplayer, pissed off Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell when he released a rightwing manifesto detailing all the horrible policies the GOP will enact if the party regains power. McConnell will happily pull the switch that unleashes hell on an unsuspecting nation. He just doesn’t want Scott leaking spoilers before opening weekend.
PREVIOUSLY: NRSC Chair Rick Scott Would Like To Remind America How Much GOP Policies SUCK
McConnell would particularly like Scott to shut up already about raising taxes. No one wins elections when you talk about raising taxes. This country isn’t crazy about poor people, but when you rant too much about freeloaders not paying taxes, you sound like a common Mitt Romney. That’s obviously not successful.
Scott has also proposed letting all federal legislation expire after five years, requiring an oh-so-productive Congress to vote on these bills again. That would arguably include entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, and McConnell knows you can’t fuck with old people’s money.
Last night, while appearing on Laura Ingraham’s white power hour, Scott sang the virtues of increased taxes on working people during a pandemic and geopolitical instability. This was all about “fairness,” which Republicans define as soaking the poor.
Rick Scott complains that people who want free government stuff are not paying taxes…pic.twitter.com/qrOeEPlnF3
— Acyn (@Acyn) 1646711308
SCOTT: Here’s what’s not fair. We have hard-working Americans — they’re paying all these taxes, and retirees pay them. Who’s not? We’ve got some billionaires not paying it, and we got people that want free government stuff and they don’t want to have any skin in the game. That’s not fair.
After Romney had his ass handed to him in 2012, he claimed that Barack Obama used the “old playbook” of giving free stuff to those people. He didn’t consider that affordable health care and education are good policies for everyone. No, it’s all just handouts for undesirables. Scott’s rhetoric is more of the same plutocrat dogma, only now he’s trying to dress it up as “populism” and smuggle it off the Titanic .
It’s true that in 2021, more than 100 million US households, or 61 percent of all taxpayers, paid no federal income taxes, but that’s a transitory number related to Democratic efforts to prevent another Great Depression. That number’s expected to drop to 42 percent this year. Putting aside billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, you’re mostly talking about households with incomes below $28,000 a year.
Last year, when the Democratic-controlled Congress increased the child tax credit , the earned income tax credit , and the child and dependent care tax credit , millions of Americans had their federal tax burden erased. But fuck anyone who claims these citizens have no “skin in the game.” They are most likely the frontline workers who keep society functioning. Also, according to the Tax Policy Center, almost everyone pays some form of state and local sales taxes, excise taxes, property taxes, and state income taxes.
PREVIOUSLY: Damn, Rick Scott *Really* Hates Poor People!
But Ingraham wants to draw more blood from the peasant stones.
INGRAHAM: If people pay even $100 ...
SCOTT: $10!
INGRAHAM: ... You don’t want people to get bankrupt, obviously.
A hundred dollars is a lot of money for the millions of Americans who can’t afford dental care. It’s not as if Scott plans to use the $10 he snatches from the poor on any social services. It’ll all go toward the construction of the Donald Trump Memorial Xenophobia Monument.
Ingraham asked her fellow millionaire Scott what was McConnell’s deal. Why didn’t he support raising taxes for the people?
INGRAHAM: Mitch has been in power for decades and decades ... since I was in college ... He’s been incredibly successful in many ways. Obviously a lot of great judicial appointments, kept Merrick Garland — a radical — off the Supreme Court.
Huh? I guess anyone slightly to the left of Antonin Scalia’s moldering corpse is a commie “radical” now.
INGRAHAM: But he’s not a populist. He’s an old-style Bush Republican on issues from globalization, trade with China ...
Sorry, the dog whistles were too loud for me to hear the rest of what she said.
Rick Scott, the third-wealthiest senator with an estimated net worth of $220 million, is no more a “populist” than McConnell, who has to make ends meet with his $34 million fortune. “Populist" is now just Fox News shorthand for “Trump First” politics. The GOP’s actual agenda still stinks with contempt for the poor. McConnell just has the sense to know that won’t sell to voters, while Scott thinks he can just slap the MAGA label on the same old voodoo economics.
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Skeletor
thank you. while I wasn't thinking of a direct causal link between ptsd and autism if it came across that way, thank you so much for your explanations. very much appreciated.