Tax talk

The horrible tax bill is another step closer to a vote on the Senate floor, could even be a soon as tomorrow or Friday but my guess is it'll be next week sometime.

During the health care showdown over the summer I stayed pretty confident that it wouldn't pass, even if it got through the Senate I didn't see it happening in the House. That is not so with this version, the House has passed it's own bill and that one will need to be reconciled with the Senate version, but the GOP majorities are more in agreement that they need to pass something this time and none of them are as vehemently opposed to what is in these bills as they are to their various pet peeves about health care.

It helps that they know the bill is so big and complicated that they can tell their constituents anything about it and they will be believed, even if it is an outright lie, which it likely would be.

The point is, I think it's gonna pass, maybe by one vote, maybe Pence has to cast the tiebreaker, but our government is going to blow up our financial future in a way we haven't seen since the 80s, if at all.

And yet... we'll survive this, many, perhaps even most, of those in need will still receive help, we will still see the occasional rags to riches success story, people will still graduate from college and invent something, the world will march on.

That is perhaps the greatest shame of it all, the fact that people will endure because they have to means that those pieces of shit in power will point to those people and use them as examples of why they were right to do what they did. They will spin to their increasingly credulous followers that it was because of their bravery in blowing up the tax code and opening the door to gutting entitlement programs that the next generation of inventors and business-people are doing so well. They'll get re-elected and somehow the government will keep functioning, and the wreckage left behind will be ignored or blamed for failing in a system explicitly designed for them to fail.

The GOP tax plan is awful, but it's almost worse that it isn't awful enough to irrevocably expose these people for what they are.

Maybe I am wrong, maybe there is a faction in congress or a few people in the Senate who still want a functional society, and we will pass the month without mortgaging the country even more to big business, I doubt it, but there is a chance I guess.