Conservatives love to go on about how liberals/progressives keep beating the same old rhetorical drums, never noticing how worn their own drumheads have become. Case in point…
Didn’t voters hand the supposed good guys all the marbles in 2016? What’s been done with them since then? The “good guys” failed to repeal O’care, gave their corporate buddies a huge tax break while apparently failing to notice the existence of whatever ragged remains of the middle class that might still barely hang on, and the current debate is whether to throw gun owners all the way under the bus or only as far as the front wheels. (That’s “compromise,” you know.)
But we’re supposed to believe that the next election will fix everything. The next election will always fix everything, because it’s always the most crucial in history. The bad bums must not be allowed to throw out the good bums, for then the republic will surely fall as they do, er, everything the good bums have been doing all along. But with more enthusiasm!
It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the fix is in before the candidates are chosen. But they’ll keep people clawing at one another, because that’s a game that never seems to get old.
What was it Joe Stalin said about giving the voter/people the illusion of choice but it is who counts the votes that matters? Or the various versions of it. It’s all basically the same sentiment. Voting in a representative government is just expressing an opinion. Any group larger than one usually has an imbalance of power.
You might want to talk with someone that actually like, you know, PAYS taxes. And who has looked at the new tax rates and withholding tables. You might find that, like, they are well ahead of where they were last year at this time, even if their employer did NOT give them a bonus or increase their wages, as a bunch of companies have done. But in all honesty, the Koch-sucking Rove Republican swill are indeed not significantly different from the Democrat Communists.
I mostly agree with anonymous above. They’re all whores, both Republican & Democrat, male and female. But since you don’t play the game, why criticize the players? Lots of us are better off financially than we were a year ago, and that’s something.
Bob, I’m not criticizing taxpayers. Why would I?
Joel, I see your point. My accountant sent me a letter addressing some of the changes in the new tax plan. You can’t deduct mortgage interest on a home anymore if it is based on an LOC secured by the home. You can’t deduct property taxes, license plate taxes, et al like you used to could. Looks like the medical deduction expense is going away , which is a real shot in the back for a lot of oldsters, even if you did have to previously spend 10% of your adjusted gross income on medical expenses to qualify for the deduction. It’s going to be almost impossible for middle class people to make “the gate” on going long form instead of short form. I don’t think everybody has a grip on that yet.
You are sure more tolerant about anonymous comments than I am.
Hmmm. 2017 AND 2018 medical expenses are deductible after exceeding 7.5% of your adjusted gross income. That rises back to 10% in 2019. The standard deduction, however, is nearly doubling. So a married couple now gets $24,000 instead of $12,700 in standard deductions, which makes itemizing moot for most people making less than $100k, unless you’ve got a monster mortgage, live in a high income tax state, and have BIG medical bills. On the down side, the personal exemptions are going away ($4,050 in 2017). Rates mostly dropped across all seven(JFC!) brackets. Bottom line, most people are going to pay less taxes, and it’s showing up as noticeable money in wage earners’ paychecks as, much to Nancy Pelosi’s and the rest of our better’s chagrin. I agrees that not much will change with the next election cycle, although it could to be hilariously entertaining. Trump is The Mule of political culture. By definition what he is doing is beyond the capacity of prediction.
I clipped this and sent it my accountant, to see what she says. I realize all this is dust in the wind, but the medical expenses and home mortgage have always been very important to me over the years, when both of us were working .
When you say “The Mule” are you referring to that old science fiction book? Can’t recall the name but had to read it as a freshman in college.
old science fiction book
One of the Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov. I forget which. The Mule was a mutant who could control minds, and apparently he threw the prognostications on which the entire series was based out of whack.