Trump Outflanks Dems from the Left
June 14: GOP tax cuts … Mifepristone and IVF … Trump’s birthday … Carlson book canceled …
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In meetings with congressional Republicans yesterday, Donald Trump1 got them to agree to eliminate taxes on tips. Millions of workers whose income includes tips would suddenly get a big bump, all because, after decades of grueling mental exertion, Trump finally figured out a way to justify skimping on his own tips..
We’re talking about a tax cut for wait staff, but also drivers, delivery folks, housekeepers, and an ever-growing number of categories of workers now including even the good folks who just slide you your food across the counter past the cash register. Hell, if the TFN accounting department ever figures out how to do it, even TFN will join the growing ranks of the proud tip economy!
Trump first floated the idea in Nevada on Sunday, when he released a 102-page white paper pulled it out of his ass during a rally. Yesterday, he spent little time discussing policy with congressional Republicans, but he did push this one, which Republicans seized onto even though it was still fresh from his ass.
House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-OK) let the curtain slip when he described the Senate GOP response: “Of course the whole place was laughing and broke out into applause.”
Laughing because it’s stupid, clapping because it’s genius. They couldn’t sign on fast enough.
“There’s considerable merit,” Cole said. “A lot of support,” said House Ways and Means member Rep. Darin LaHood (R-IL). Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), possibly Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) successor as Senate GOP leader, said, “That should be on the table.”
And Democrats? Excuse me, Democrats in a presidential election year? Here’s the sentence you don’t want Roll Call writing, but write it Roll Call did: “Reactions from Democrats were mixed.”
Mixed?!?
Democrats are so laser-focused on embaddening anything that comes out of Trump’s mouth, that they were pooh-pooing tax cuts for millions of working poor. FDR would be kicking their asses right now if he were alive and, uh, kicking.
Like caricature nerds reminding Teacher to give homework for the holiday weekend, there were Democrats raising their hands and ooh-ooh, me-me-ing to explain why ending taxes on tips is a bad idea.
“I don’t think that’s the place to begin. We need to look at the overall tax structure,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) said like a nerd. “[B]eginning to exclude certain kinds of income from taxation, more loopholes and changes, probably not where I would begin.”
And, like a nerd, he’s annoyingly not necessarily wrong. Why is it a bad idea?
Payroll taxes help fund Medicare and Social Security. Taxes on tips generated an estimated $38 billion in revenues in 2018. That’d be gone.
It would also give restaurants and other food or food-adjacent establishments a big excuse to cut already-low wages further. Center for Economic and Policy Research Senior Economist Dean Baker wrote that “exempting tips from taxes will just encourage more employers to expect workers to get more of their pay in tips.” Meaning: cut wages.
Plus it’d be powerful motivation for restaurants and other businesses to entippify everyone’s jobs.
So you’d basically create a rationale for businesses to cut everyone’s wages. Ultimately, eliminating all these taxes could create an irreversible economic cycle. First, the trend of hitting you up for tips on seemingly everything would explode. That would make it more expensive to go out, order in, travel, or breathe…which leads to people doing all those things less, which triggers businesses closing, which astronomers say can only end with the heat death of the universe.
But while Democrat nerds are quoting the tax code, y’know who likes Trump’s plan? Vegas waitresses. Y’know who doesn’t care about abortion rights? People who can’t afford abortions. (I know, not true, even they care about abortions, but you get my point!)
Where’d Trump get the idea? “He would like to tell you that it was incredible research and policy discussion, but the secret is, he got it from a waitress,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND).
Which is bullshit. Not the part about getting it from a waitress, the conceit that Trump would like to claim it was from research. Which he disdains.
Thing is, people will love it even more because it came from a waitress, regardless of whether Trump was sexually harassing her at the time.
But instead of recognizing the political threat here — and you can blame Trump Derangement Syndrome if you want — Democrats are focused on Trump’s alleged senility and his motives.
This wildly popular idea came from the same guy Democrats would have you believe is a gibbering, drooling dementia patient because he goes off-script with dumb tangents about sharks. Or that Trump is hellbent on enrichening the rich.
The “2017 tax law is evidence of his true priorities,” said Ways and Means member Dan Kildee (D-MI), referring to Trump’s tax cuts for all the illionaires. “He didn’t care about tipped workers.”
My congressdude, Trump cares about whoever’s basking in the glow of his heat-generating face at any given point in time. Democrats can’t simultaneously argue that Trump is incoherent and that his rhetoric is strategically calculated to hide his true priorities. But Democrats do. And their reaction to this plan is…mixed.
“When it comes to tax policy, we do not have a tax code that requires the wealthiest and well-connected to pay their fair share. That’s got to be our first priority,” Kildee said. But for people worried how they’re going to make their next mortgage or rent payment, that’s the first priority. Fairness in how the tax code enscrews other people is way down the list.
Because our media don’t like substance, Trump’s tax plan is also one of those things that’s slipping past the radar, which makes it dangerous. Democrats won’t have to craft a coherent, effective response, but you better believe it’ll get mainlined directly to those workers, like the ones who could make the difference in tipping (sorry) Nevada to Trump.
And in the absence of national messaging strategy, Democrats will respond like… Democrats.
Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of Nevada’s Culinary Workers Union Local 226, said, “Nevada workers are smart enough to know the difference between real solutions and wild campaign promises from a convicted felon.”
Really? They’re all smart enough to do that? And all Nevada workers, even non-union, are economically strong enough to pass up a tax break?
And no Nevada workers will believe Larry Kudlow, of Fox, who called the plan “sheer genius,” arguing that Republicans are offering a tax break while Democrats hired more IRS workers as part of their “war against workers”? Even though workers can see Democrats opposing Trump’s tax cut proposal?
Democrats don’t have the luxury of continuing to respond based on the system as it is. They need to articulate their ultimate vision for America instead of answering solely based on what’s doable, acceptable, feasible right now
Stop pre-compromising. Stop baking in Republican opposition. If there’s a proposal you would make real if you had the power to, that should be your platform. Universal Basic Income? Miss me with how it’s got no chance in a Republican House. No one who votes knows or gives a shit. Run on it. Hell, just end taxes for any household making less than $50,000. You wanna pay for it? Take Elon Musk’s Tesla payout.
If nothing else, you’ll have protected your left flank. Then Democrats could say, “Trump wants to end taxes on tips? Really? That’s his Band-Aid™ to help blue-collar workers instead of the Democratic plan to make sure everyone takes home a living wage every damn week?”
You need something bigger, not wonkier. “Now that Trump understands the country doesn’t need revenue from folks just scraping by, Republicans can join us raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour.” It’s basic judo, people, and I flunked out of karate after two weeks. When I was 12!
And I’m not alone thinking that’s the way to go. After I wrote all that, I found Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, weighing in to Julia Conley of Common Dreams on the same theme. Trump’s plan, Jayaraman said, should serve as a warning cry to “Democrats who have yet to come out at any level, calling for what workers really do need this year: a living wage."
GOP Votes for Reproductive Rights. And Wrongs.
The entire Supreme Court yesterday voted to preserve the right to kill precious unborn babies in the uterus as long as it’s done before the baby’s soul decides to get a face, and as long as the murder weapon is mifepristone.
To be sure, the ruling had nothing to do with whether you should be able to murder your precious, invisible-to-the-naked-eye pre-babies. The court unanimously rejected a challenge to mifepristone’s legality based not on the merits but on the issue of whether the issue was any of the plaintiffs’ fucking business.
The court, including all the right-wingers — in a decision written by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh…’s team of clerks — effectively decided that what a pregnant person does with their body is no one else’s business. What a concept! If only they’d known that earlier!
The suit was filed by doctors who said the issue impacts them because they might have to treat patients who take mifepristone. Which is a flawed argument because (a) mifepristone is safe, but also because (b) that’s like me challenging the Dobbs ruling ending abortion rights because some forced-delivery kid might grow up to be a shitty, white-supremacist, Christian-nationalist Supreme Court judge. It could happen!
Anyway, the point is that, because the ruling solely addressed the issue of whether plaintiffs had standing to sue — and not the merits of the argument — yesterday’s ruling doesn’t preclude a different ruling down the road.
The reason Roe v. Wade could be overturned — even though that case, too, involved uteri that were no one else’s business — is that advocates for reproductive rights filed the initiating suit against Mississippi’s abortion ban, and those advocates had standing because the ban affected fucked over tons of people. Which made it their business.
In other words, the Supreme Court doesn’t wanna weigh in if someone doesn’t like the rights someone else has, but it will weigh in if a state bans that right for everyone.
You see where this is going, right?
Already, about half the states limit the right to use mifepristone. A lawsuit challenging those state limits could give the Supreme Court an opening to ban mifepristone. Or, if Donald Trump wins and Republicans control the Congress, they could implement a federal mifepristone ban legislatively, which of course would lead to a huge explosion in the number of Trump’s unwanted offspring.
IVF And, sure enough, Senate Republicans yesterday voted to deny you the federal right to have a baby using science instead of the old-fashioned method of drunken rutting.
The only Republicans who voted in support of IVF rights were Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). So you literally had to go to the ends of the country to find a single Republican willing to stand up for IVF rights.
And, as your humble TFN alerted you beforehand, Republicans pushed their perversion of “religious freedom” as the justification. Why? Because the Democratic IVF bill might have required health-care plans to include some IVF coverage — a huge infringement on the religious freedom of some employer or someone whose otherwise untainted religious purity would now be tainted by the trail their fungible money takes into someone else’s uterus.
Just a quick reminder that “religious freedom” is the freedom to practice your religion free of discriminatory laws, not the right to exempt yourself from laws that apply equally to everyone regardless of which magic book is their favorite.
Happy Birthday, Donald Trump
No matter how you feel about Donald Trump, you should say “happy birthday!” to Donald Trump today. Republicans should say it because it’s a rare opportunity to say something based on fact: Today is Donald Trump’s birthday. And Democrats can say it because, like many a fact, Trump hates it.
“There’s a certain point at which you don’t want to hear ‘Happy Birthday,’” Trump said Sunday after his supporters sang it to him. “You just want to pretend the day doesn’t exist.”
As CNN notes, according to Trump, 78, which he now is, is not old. And, statistically speaking, Trump is correct. For the average American male, 78 is not old, it’s dead. The American life expectancy is 76-something years. Meaning 78 is so old that most Americans never even get to be it.
Here’s another thing most Americans have in common, aside from dying younger than Trump is: Most Americans agree that both Trump and even-older Pres. Joe Biden are too old to be president.
Both men are so old that whoever wins on Election Day will in January become the oldest person ever to be sworn in as president.
All of which can be found miles deep on the list of concerns about either presidency. There’s a hell of a lot of ageism baked into what passes for our national discourse about the presidency. As I’ve written, Biden was always a magnet for verbal rubber-neckers. Trump has always said deranged shit.
Electing either man really means electing the coterie that surrounds them. Biden’s will support him. Trump’s will drag him and us down into a white, Christian dystopia.
So I won’t disagree that they’re too old, but they’re also both too lots of shit. So stop sweating the age issue and if you’re a Democrat, wish Trump a happy birthday. If you’re a Republican and don’t wanna piss him off, you can bake him a cake instead. With a file in it.
Five Quickies
(It’s Friday, so some of these are long reads, but here they’re quickies!)
A big-ass book on big ass Tucker Carlson has been canceled because people stopped caring about him when Fox canceled him.
Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) is considering banning face masks on New York City subways after a rash of antisemitic incidents involving mask-wearing antisemites. I’m not sure a face-mask ban is workable, or even advisable given legitimate health issues, but recent vandalism and rhetoric in New York appear to have gone way beyond the line of legitimate political messaging and well into full-blown antisemitism. This is New York fucking City, people. If America’s a Christian nation, New York’s a Jewish city. No one fucking loves Jewish people like New York, so Cut. The. Fucking. Shit.
Hamas says it doesn’t know how many of the remaining hostages captured on Oct. 7 are still alive. Roughly 120 have yet to be released, and it’s not known how many may have been killed by Israeli bombardments. Or by Hamas. Quick suggestion, just spitballing, you could calculate the number remaining by counting them as they walk free!
The Senate Judiciary Committee turned up three more trips Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas took that were paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow. That may seem like a drop in the corrupt bucket, but this is the kind of drip-drip that’s often done as build-up to real legislation. Though impeachment’s also an option. Just sayin’.
A former U.S. customs officer has been convicted of taking money to let vehicles loaded with drugs come into the U.S. from Mexico, so obviously we need more customs officers.
TCB
DCC3FRFP I’ve been watching your comments about whether to keep DCC3FRFP, so I’ll continue experimenting and playing around with some sort of mealy-mouthed, Democratic Party attempt to make everyone happy but will piss off everyone.
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Go get ‘em, kids…! And have a great weekend, with or without Father’s Day — it’s up to you whether and how to give a shit about it!
A disgraced, criminally convicted, tridicted, fraudster, rapist, former president.
On the suggestion to end taxes on tips... I agree that the Democrats should lean into this, with a caveat: end taxes on tips as long as you raise taxes on the 1%. Fair?
Why say Trump skimps on tips? He is known for generous tipping. Think I made mistake paying for this news