MESO-Rx
Anabolic Steroids
Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
- Start date
It is something you wouldn’t believe if you weren’t seeing it, but such is the age we have entered. The GOP clanks unstoppably toward passing a tax “reform” bill that isn’t reform. Legislators who swore that deficits were the most fundamental threat to the nation will vote for a deficit-busting tax bill. Everyone waits for the deficit hawks to assert themselves in a party that consisted of nothing but deficit hawks a minute ago. But now it turns out there are none at all. Lawmakers sent to Washington to do the public bidding are about to pass a law that almost nobody supports. They say it favors the middle class over the rich when the exact opposite is true. They say it’s hard to know its exact impact before all the scoring is completed, but they are rushing to pass it before scoring can be completed. They say that above all else, they need a win, and they prepare to pass the biggest loser for American budgetary sanity in memory.
How is this happening? Good programming is how. The wealthy backers of the GOP have been writing, beta testing, rewriting and perfecting the code written for their legislator-robots for more than three decades now. The robots themselves are experiencing a bit of cognitive whiplash themselves, because some remnants of their biological origin remain. But their programming overrides it all. The base code is simple. “Tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich.” The rest of the coding is variants of “as much as you can, as fast as you can.”
Along the sidelines, observers shout at the robots with fine arguments about how their policy makes no sense. About how it will damage our fiscal health. About how it will exacerbate wealth inequality. About how wealthy heirs inheriting even more tax-free money is not in the public interest in any way. It doesn’t matter. The programming makes the robots deaf to reason, like Ulysses’s crew with their ears stopped up with wax against the sirens’ songs. They are deaf, but able to move their lips and recite words that they have not written, do not understand and often do not even agree with, about tax cuts that pay for themselves. And on they march.
Those of us (the actual majority of voters) who do not wish to see this happen stand transfixed in horror and without tools to stop it. “Elections have consequences,” we are told, even as we recheck the numbers and see that the majority didn’t vote for this. No matter. The algorithm says we lost and must lose the tax battle too, and the court-appointments battle too, and likely the health-insurance battle too, and on and on until we are broken and heaped up as salvage for parts.
If you listen closely, you can hear the robotic whir. As in “We whir a democracy, once.”
