The hard-right lawmakers are insisting on steeper spending cuts to Medicaid and the Biden-era green energy tax breaks, among other changes, before they will give their support to President Donald Trump’s “beautiful” bill. They warn the tax cuts alone would pile onto the nation’s $36 trillion debt.
The failed vote, 16-21, stalls, for now, House Speaker Mike Johnson’s push to have the package approved next week. But the Budget Committee plans to reconvene Sunday to try again. Lawmakers vowed to negotiate into the weekend as Trump is returning to Washington from the Middle East.
“Something needs to change or you’re not going to get my support,” said Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas.
I never understand the constant pressure to the middle class and “poor.” Like how do you expect ANYTHING to get done if people have nothing?
I always go back to thinking about corporations and anyone who produces a “product” and think what consumer will spend the money they don’t have so some company and their board can have more money? If consumers have no money to spend, how will the rich continue to extract it from them? You can’t draw blood from a stone. They don’t even have to care about people, but if there’s literally nothing to take from them, then where is all the “wealth” coming from?
When the government just takes the tax money and gives it to the wealthy there really is no reason to have to go through the act of building a business and hoping people buy your product or service.
As long as a non zero portion of that middle class are happy in their place because they have an under class to punch down on shit isn’t going to change. We have people blaming immigrants for their problems, one of the least powerful segments of our society. How absolutely brain dead do you have to be to think the folks that can’t vote or hold office are the ones pulling the strings in our semi representative democracy?
Slavery. Or feadalistic serfdom.
I think you’re just thinking too far ahead, they look at the quarterly bottom line and how to make it grow for the next quarter, no matter what.
I think this is exactly where the deepest crises of capitalism come from. What you describe is a natural consequence of unregulated capitalism. Either you start regulating (breaking up monopolies or nationalising them, high tax brackets on the very rich, etc.) before you hit a depression, or you risk a revolution by only enacting them after the shit has hit the fan. Then you can have a generation, maybe two, who reap the benefits of enforced redistribution. And then folks get complacent and start deregulation again.
I wonder if the overall thinking is that people need to feel progress to feel good about their lot in life but they can’t constantly deliver that, so they need the political “heels” to come by make things feel worse and then cede to people to make it “better” to make people feel like progress is made
Kind of like how the net result is increased tariffs but because they were temporarily more severe, the general reaction is “the tariffs are gone, what a relief”
Rolling that boulder up the hill requires it roll back downhill so people can cheer it being rolled up the hill again.
Hunger and fear and great motivators. MAGA want to reduce US society to where the peasants have no choice but to accept what the Nobility gives them. Or be sent to for-profit prisons after becoming homeless, to labor for free.
Neo Feudalism, with MAGA as The Aristos.
Ideology does that.