[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Severian

I disagree very strongly. This is a huge deal. This is a knife-twist. This is going to feed poverty (not people in poverty, but poverty itself), and widen the income gap. This is tailor-made to kept the rich rich and keep the poor poor.

$500 in tax cuts for someone making $35,000 a year isn’t going to mean shit when their health care is gone. This is a pestilential, malicious fucking corporate coup. Not business as usual.

Not that anything has been business as usual for some time now.

Indeed. From https://fareedzakaria.com/2017/12/01...er-than-we-do/ :

Watching the Republican tax plan race through Congress, one is reminded of a big apparent difference between President Trump's program and other populist movements in the Western world. In the United States, Trump is leading something that is best described as plutocratic populism, a mixture of traditional populist causes with extreme libertarian ones.

Congress's own think tanks — the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office — calculate that in 10 years, people making between $50,000 and $75,000 (around the median income in the United States) would effectively pay a whopping $4 billion more in taxes, while people making $1 million or more would pay $5.8 billion less under the Senate bill. And that doesn't take into account the massive cuts in services, health care and other benefits that would likely result. Martin Wolf, the sober and fact-based chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, concludes, "This is a determined effort to shift resources from the bottom, middle and even upper middle of the U.S. income distribution toward the very top, combined with big increases in economic insecurity for the great majority."