Sometimes, when I write about someone passing away, it’s with sadness because the person was good and did good things in the world. Willie Mays was like that. But sometimes, when I write about someone passing away, it’s with happiness because the person was an evil blight on humanity and did damage for money. People like Jim Inhofe.

Inhofe was definitely in the second camp. He was a Senator, a Republican (of course), and a staunch defender of the oil companies’ battle to boost climate change. Inhofe helped win that fight. Now the world will suffer increasingly hotter winters, more violent tropical storms and hurricanes, more floods, droughts, crop failures, and all the other horrible things science has been trying to warn us about since the 1950’s – only to be ignored. Or, more accurately, shouted down by people who refused to understand.

Inhofe was the moron who brought a snowball, a weather event, into the Senate chambers to show that climate change, a climate event, wasn’t real – because snow still happened. 89 years the planet suffered under the weight of this man’s stupidity. Thanks, in part, to him, we STILL get to suffer but HE shuffled off and avoided the worst of his actions. Classic con move.

Oh, well, at least I can take comfort that where he went is (reportedly) much hotter than where we are…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Do you know what I find ironic? With the help of compliant conservatives, the one percent is right on the precipice of winning their class war. I know, it’s been presented (by the one percent, remember) as a “culture war” but it’s been a class war since the start. They want to be an official aristocracy and FDR made that difficult. Sure, FDR also made the country the financial envy of the world and created the largest and strongest middle class the world had ever known but rich people couldn’t get AS rich AS fast under his rules so those rules had to go.

But they couldn’t have done it alone. They needed a mob. They found one in conservatives and they led the cons around by the nose through fraudulent (and very scary) broadcasts that looked real enough to fool people not paying too much attention. The one percent seduced the cons with easy answers. Trump’s main gift is his constant promises of easy answers to complex problems. That’s why they love him. Easy answers.

No, none of that is the ironic part. That’s just background. One of Trump’s easy answers is yet another tax cut or worse. He has actually floated the idea of eliminating income taxes altogether and replacing them with tariffs on goods. Every competent economist has blasted the proposal but “smart” and “MAGA” simply do not go together.

All of these tax cuts are a one percent wet dream as well. They just get richer and richer but, have you noticed? The country keeps having to cut services and opportunities because we can’t afford them. “Cut more!” is all we ever hear. They don’t talk about it like they used to. These days, they pretend it’s all about stimulating investment but there was a time they said the quiet part out loud.

There was this conservative Bozo known as Grover Norquist. He once held the Republican Party in his grip with nearly perfect control. He had them sign a pledge that they would never, ever raise taxes nor allow them to be raised. If they didn’t sign, they didn’t get any support from the GOP. If they DID sign, he could wave that promise around at them any time one of them seemed about to act for the good of the country instead of rich people.

Old Grover said a lot of things over the course of his career but, to me, his most famous quote is “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The “reduce it to the size” part is the tax cuts. They seem designed to bankrupt the nation.
“Hey, it feels like we might be getting to the ironic part, here, pretty soon.”
“Yeah, it does.”
And so we are…

I became curious about how all of these tax cuts would affect people when the government is, finally, bankrupt. Do you know who it looks like is going to suffer the most as a result of conservative mantras? Why, mostly, that would be conservative states! Isn’t THAT ironic?

The cons only think about welfare recipients (the easy answer) and except for themselves, think ALL welfare recipients should be cut off immediately since the other ones are “only committing fraud.” But the government does a LOT more than just welfare. When one bundles all the money the Federal government gives to states that need help, the most Federally dependent states are mostly red.

Okay, there ARE a couple of blue states in there but it seems likely that, as blue states, they’ll vote against red for the good of the nation and, frankly, themselves. There’s nothing ironic about that. But if we look at the top fifteen states that are Federally dependent, we find Alaska (1), Louisiana (2), Montana (3), Arizona (5), Wyoming (6), Kentucky (8), Mississippi (9), Texas (10), West Virginia (12), and Tennessee (14).

That’s ten of the top fifteen Federally dependent states that can be counted on to do serious damage to themselves in support of the richest people in this once-great nation. Even more ironic? They’ll do that financial harm to themselves, chanting their mantra about voting their own interest – all while voting against their own interest and in rich people’s interest, instead…

Hold on to your hats, folks. It’s going to be quite a (terrifying) ride…