Cutting throats, not taxes
Dear editor:
When my late husband and I occasionally ate out, he would tip our waitresses
20 percent or more. Many of these women had this experience: they married early, had children and their husband left or cheated on them. Even if married, they struggled. Also, my husband knew that a waitress earned about $2 an hour plus tips. Of course, small restaurants usually have difficulty, yet chain restaurants could give their helpers close to the minimum wage.
Data shows that many of these hardworking ladies vote Republican, as their ministers tell them to because of cultural wars. Not only won’t Trump’s tax laws help low-wage people in restaurants, bigbox stores like Target, nursing homes or fast-food places, but these laborers will have less chance to help their children with food stamps, and Republicans are taking
$1 trillion from Medicaid. Working-class people would benefit by a direct child rebate on the huge (proportionately) payroll tax that they pay. Children will die as the right-wingers play roulette on Wall Street.
Before the New Deal, corporations killed, bashed or scab-replaced white, working-class men. After Roosevelt died, the right-wingers and Republicans passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, a fatal blow to unions that took until 1981 to kill working-people’s jobs and wages.
Many of the working classes vote and voted for Trump and other Republicans because of War on the Poor, cultural wars,
resentment/dog-whistle politics and the Southern strategy. Repeated history tells us that tax cuts for the rich (starting with Mellon cuts, 1926) do not create jobs; instead they bring misery. The Reagan tax cuts cost our family thousands in payroll taxes and the 1986 Tax Reform Bill and several more thousand in property taxes as Republicans moved taxes to state and lower levels.
And we suffered from George W.’s tax cuts, resulting in the Great Recession (too many Bush-dollars in speculations). George W.’s and Reagan’s generous wealthy-orientated tax cuts moved jobs overseas, facilitated corporate raiders to steal union and other pensions, lowered real middle-class wages, and multiplied many CEO’s income a hundred or more times. Trump’s swamp creatures axed a border-adjustment tax which could have created jobs and revenue, but a Democratic approach is generously paying businesses for each American they employ. Neither would bankrupt the U.S., as pending bills will.
Also, the elderly tend to vote Republican because of cultural wars while, ironically, the right-wing/Republican goal is total elimination of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. To cut-cut-cut our throats and to make their rich donors happy Republicans and Trump are cutting one-half trillion from Medicare and making horrible cuts to Medicaid, which gives nursing home care. Better for the country and job creation would be eliminating Social Security taxes on low-level oldsters and modestly increasing Social Security for widows/widowers. We would buy things, making a growing trickle-up, job-creating economy.
The right-wing billionaires have the money to save fetuses, children and adults. However, they want our last penny.
Rebuttal to Weinstein conflation writer: Tim Murphy, “pro-life” Republican Representative — told mistress, “Have abortion.”
Linda Woodbury Hot Springs