Tax Bill December 2017

By Bellator Senex

I had my first job when I was eleven years old. I set pins at a blowing alley on Harlingen Air Force Base, in Texas. Even though I made little to nothing, my employer took out for Medicare and Social Security. From that day, until I retired from business about five years ago, I paid into those government programs.
    From time to time, the government has borrowed from the pot that we, the working class, own. I say working class because the rich don’t pay into the fund. Anyway, the politicians treat our money like a slush fund, taking what they want and replacing the money with an I.O.U. – or government bond, as they call it. Then they claim the fund is going broke. The problem is that the government owes the fund so much money, it can’t pay it back.
    Now that the new tax bill is about to be passed, big political donors will receive a windfall for their investment in politicians. The politicians whose party currently has the majority have said that after the tax bill passes, they will next attend to Medicare and Social Security. Their intent is to give money to the rich and make us pay for it.
    I have seen this dog-and-pony show before; they give with the right hand and take with the left. I can assure you that what they take is much more than what they give. If this bill passes in its present form – and most of what’s currently in it will pass – and I were still running a business, I would not be able to continue to run it, and many current small business owners are in the same boat. A small business owner or a homeowner needs deductions to live, but these are mostly going away. Under an earlier tax law, we could deduct the interest or tax we paid on anything we bought. And then limits were set as to what we could claim as a deduction (limits that didn’t apply to the rich). We got a few hundred dollars but lost thousands, and now the politicians are coming back for the rest of our money.

A war has been going on for a long time, and people have been made to think it is between Republicans and Democrats, but it’s really between the one percent and the rest of us, whom the rich seek to enslave. The war started when Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, broke up the corporations because they had gotten so big and powerful they were running the country. The laws that were put in place to prevent that from happening again have slowly been weakened or removed.
    Now the floodgates are open once more. The men who ran those corporations back then believed they were ordained by God to rule the uneducated lower classes. Financier J.P. Morgan, giant of steel and other industries, expressed this belief many times. (“If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.”) Donald Trump has expressed his belief that whatever is in his genes is why he is so smart and successful.
    We produce the crops and thank those at the big table for the crumbs they give back to us. We are better than that, and we deserve better. Remember that when they say they can’t fund our schools, or medical help for our children, or nursing homes for old people, or food for the poor. When your adult kids are living at home while trying to pay off a college loan they can’t even deduct the interest on, or when you are told by the corporation you work for that there are no bonuses for Christmas, remember: it was this tax bill that brought it about.
    It’s not too late, we can take back our country, but not as Republicans or Democrats, we’ll have to do it as American Citizens.

Copyright © 2017 by Ed Rogers Bellator Senex (“Old Warrior”) is a penname of contributing editor Ed Rogers.