Thursday, August 24, 2017

Trump Delivers To His Constituencies

The generals are in charge and they got exactly what they wanted, a permanent war in Afghanistan. Its details will be kept from the public and it is guaranteed to bring giant military budgets forever and ever. The military-industrial complex will win out, no matter what stuffed dummy sits in the White House.

(The comedian Bill Hicks used to say that every new president is taken into a secret dark room and shown footage of the Kennedy assassination from an angle no one else has ever seen. He’s then asked, “Any questions, Mr. President?” I’m starting to think something like this must be true.)

But don’t worry, Trump’s other main constituency will soon get its biggest wish too. According to CNBC, “multiple Wall Street strategists” are laying odds that the one thing Congress can get done this year will be, wait for it, tax cuts. The bad news is that Republicans probably won’t be able to cut the corporate tax rate to 15 or 20 percent as they’d hoped, but will have to settle for 25 percent instead. Nor will they be able to “eliminate popular deductions, like those for mortgage interest, charitable giving, or state and local property taxes.” Nothing in life can be perfect, I suppose. Perhaps they can eliminate those popular deductions next year, when, with any luck, the little people will be distracted by a brand new war or hit TV show.

If  you look past Trump’s strategically outrageous tweets, you can see and smell a familiar thing. It’s called business as usual in America.        

1 comment:

One Fly said...

Yup!

The Zapruder thing is interesting because it's always seemed to me for the most part that somewhere along the line after winning the presidency these guys change because somebody clues these guys in on just what the hell is really going on.