Our President-elect has put forward his tax cut plan, and surprise, surprise! It's standard right-wing fare, where folks on the low end pay more in taxes, while people on the high end pay a lot less. Mr. Trump may have said a long time ago that he thought the rich should pay more, which may be related to the fact that poll after poll tells us Americans want the rich to pay more in taxes, but ye shall know them by their deeds, not their words. Other Trump plans, of course, would cut the corporate income tax rate by more than half and permit corporations to "repatriate" income held "offshore" and pay less than a quarter of the taxes on it. Naturally Republicans will frame these policies as a job-creation program, but a little thing called "the Bush Administration" happened, where we did all these stupid things, and you will recall that none of them worked -- even the "socialist" Barack Obama far outpaced Mr. Bush in job creation. Folks, there's no point in "giving Trump a chance" if he's going to do the same old crap we already know makes everything worse. Hence you may use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to tell your Reps and Senators to oppose the Trump tax plan.
Meanwhile, we learn from Paul Ryan not only that the second-place finisher in the popular vote earned a "mandate" from the voters, but that he's going to destroy Medicare. "In order to save it," of course, although anyone who has considered his plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program with which seniors might buy more expensive private insurance already knows that's a stupid idea that will endanger seniors and, not incidentally, fail to save the taxpayer any money. What might actually make Medicare work a little more efficiently? Why, allowing it to negotiate its own drug prices, of course! But Our Glorious Elites would never propose such a thing, since it would cost some Big Pharma CEO some small amount of money he won't be able to use to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home. You know what else might make it work more efficiently? Expanding it to include everyone. Really, Medicare actually works pretty well, especially considering that it's essentially a pool of people who need a lot of health care; if we put millions of actually healthy people into the system, it would work even better. I think this matter also merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators.
Finally, Republicans have big plans for financial regulations -- as in, they plan to gut them, even though the modest reforms put in place by the Dodd-Frank law of 2010 have clearly helped stave off another financial meltdown of the kind that afflicted this economy in 2008. The plans Mr. Trump and Congressional Republicans plan to implement -- which include destroying the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and letting the biggest banksters get even bigger -- will only put us at greater risk of banksters getting drunk with all their hifalutin dice-rolling and putting even more good Americans out of their jobs and homes and into the poorhouse. And that poorhouse will also be considerably smaller once the Trumpsters are done with it! But this is still America, a land of representative government, and our Reps and Senators are supposed to represent our will regardless of party affiliation. And our will is most assuredly not that banksters get bigger and ruin our economy. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the pro-bankster chaos agenda of the coming Trump Administration.
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