Temat: Wybory USA

GOP tax cut led to record $1 trillion in stock buybacks that do little for working Americans — The GOP tax cut delivered huge benefits to rich investors and CEOs through a record-setting $1 trillion in stock buybacks in 2018 – while average workers struggle to pay for rising health care and living costs. Stock buybacks do nothing to improve business operations or help workers. The corporate tax cut gave more cash to companies that are sitting on historically large cash reserves, while failing to provide firms with any incentive to hire workers or boost pay.

Imagine being picked-on by a group of private school kids your whole life. They called you stupid. They said your church teaches bigotry and your family teaches racism. They took 20% of every dollar you earned, then they shipped your brother off to die in Afghanistan.

Then some guy from Queens moves in next door. He laughs at those private school kids. He pushes them around until they give back some of your money. They call him a bigot too, but he doesn’t seem to care. He promises you another of your siblings will never come home in a box.

It might bother you when he uses vulgarity and invectives, but that’s easy to overlook because for the first time, someone is standing-up to those private school kids, calling-out their foolishness and self-righteousness. He might be a bully, but he’s on your team. That doesn’t mean you approve of bully tactics to get your way, or want to be a bully yourself, but it does mean you accept that nobody should think it’s okay to bully an entire worldview and way of life out of existence unless they’re prepared for the possibility to face a bully themselves one day. In other words, “if you don’t want none, don’t start none.”

The thing is, despite whatever those private school kids and their teachers say about you, and whatever they write about you in the school paper, you are more than happy to tolerate and respect their values, so long as they extend you the same courtesy. You don’t want to legislate their jobs out of existence, tax them until they’re as poor as you are, fill their schools with your teachers, or make them pay for a new roof for your church.

You believe diversity means more than skin tone, gender, and sexual identity. You believe a diverse society is one where different ideas are allowed and even encouraged to co-exist. They might squabble once and a while, and that’s okay, because that’s how consensus is reached between parties with different goals.

But these private school kids, they don’t like that idea. They won’t leave you alone until you embrace their ideas, adopt their lifestyle, and share their vision for the future—a future that has no room for the person you are or the community to which you belong.

So yeah, you’re glad this guy from Queens showed up. He’s not perfect—far from it—but he’s willing to take the punches and it’s really hard to knock him down.

You might say, “but this Queens guy...he’s also a private school kid!” That’s true, but they never accepted him either, repulsed by his love of Big Macs and resentful that he only got accepted because his dad had cash. But that’s precisely why he gets your situation. He might have money, but he knows what it’s like to be sneered and heckled by the Lacrosse Team.