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skidive1 · 4 years ago

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BASE

(“Base: showing little or no honor…mean…ignoble…contemptible”. Webster’s New World Collegiate Dictionary)

There is the thing called the Trump Base. Obviously (though, to them, many things are not obvious) the Base is not all the people who voted for Donald Trump, but it is the hard core. Without them Trump is even less than the bad joke that he is with them, so to get the joke it is worth talking just about them.

Get over the business about how there are lots of greedy billionaires, just wanting Trump to give them tax breaks. Get past the college graduate business types who also have financial reasons for supporting, this slow-witted, lazy bankrupt Daddy-boy, but nevertheless still dream of an America where free enterprise & entrepreneurship are solid cornerstones of a society. Maybe they just figure that given his laziness Trump would run a Government too indolent to touch them. Debatable but inconsequential.

Those blocs provide a screen that the Trump Base can use to make it seem that they are part of a big movement where they can pretend that their role-model genuinely has the support of a great many people. Reject the dodge. Flush them out. Look at who they are – this sine qua non in the triumph of stupidity. They are the least educated in a society that affords almost everyone a chance to be educated. Lack of education is their emblem, their hallmark, their defining characteristic.

Give the Base this much, they have demonstrated the sense to hide behind the cover that Liberals – in their always dangerous naivete – have given to them. They claim to be among the “forgotten”. And, of course, based on being “forgotten” you can always neutralize Liberal critics & get a nice huggy-cuddle from any bleeding-heart who happens by. Yes, the dumb-ass Democrats really did forget them. Except…that is irrelevant.

They could have gone beyond 8th grade….GED…high school diploma or whatever.. They just did not. Now they are left to whine & snarl about how “the elites look down on them“. That snot is just the Liberal pity-me sympathy dodge turned against itself. Who looks down on the Base? They do…in the mirror. Why? Because they know that they were not left behind. They stayed behind. They just simply lacked the wits to get into the aerospace, computer, mechanical revolution that propelled the rest of America ahead.

For 65 years with the exploding demands of technology begging for 10s-of-millions of people to get Associate Degrees in technology of every kind, they neglected to go to Community College, generation after generation. That meant, of course, that they did not go on to University either. So, lacking adequate job skills, they also tried to get through life without that most collegiate of all educational accomplishments – the development of critical thinking skills.

Now they are Toothless, Tattooed, Trailer-Tenant, Tow-Truckers for Trump, because he is like them. They look in the mirror & see him. (After all, there is nothing that such people as Trump like better than looking in the mirror.) There is the inarticulate, poorly-educated, vulgar, slow-witted, crude, nasty, resentful, crooked, sneaky little fat man who can incarnate the dream of being able to snarl at the “elites” but get away with it.

Why is he so uniquely that man? Because…duh?... he inherited more than $600-million from his Daddy.

Did not have to work for it.

The only labor he was involved in was a characteristically passive part. He went through labor with his mother. That was only because he had to. He had not yet figured a way to pay someone to do it for him. An American dream…big money…no work.

Could let Daddy buy him an Ivy League Degree – without an Ivy League education – by majoring in real estate.

(Note to the Base who did not go to college: Real estate is not exactly a legitimate undergraduate major. It is (maybe) something that you can specialize in at the graduate level after getting a real degree.)

Could afford to go bankrupt time-after-time-after-time & stick poor suckers with the debt.

(More Note to the base: When your pudgy hero got out of complete bankruptcy default it was by screwing people like you & he gets away with that because he knows that you are way too unsophisticated to figure it out. That is what those critical thinking skills are for. You know…the things that you do not have.)

Looks like the real estate major was worth it, though – time-share salesmen like Trump do develop a terrific sense for spotting suckers. It beats being an actual businessman if you do not have the talent to actually manage. Remember, the bankruptcies were his own projects…not part of the Daddy thing. Trump…the man who went bankrupt running a casino. What are the odds? Oops…too much arithmetic for a boy without a real education.

Could use the inheritance from Daddy to hire New York public relations people to make him seem like anything the suckers would swallow -- patriot, businessman, sophisticate.

(More Note to the base: People in Manhattan know how this works. Being actual sophisticates, they know Trump as a cheesy failure. Oh…maybe that is why he lost his own borough in a landslide…twice.)

What do you think, Base…?...time to wake up & get a clue…?...or do you just want to go back to watching Nascar & Championship Wrestling (no fake media there, eh?) or, dwelling on the fact that you are not looked down on…you are just irrelevant…self-made, though.

M.Scott...May, 2021

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uk-news-talking-politics · 4 years ago

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Labour’s terrible tax muddle

By Ian Dunt

It's like waves eroding the base of a cliff. Labour had established a solid, principled, literate position on economic policy which had the potential to pay a long-term political dividend. But the waves keep coming - opinion polls, left-wing criticism, a bit of sneaky meddling by Rishi Sunak - and now each one rolling in does more damage.

Labour started with a good position. In January, shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds gave a speech outlining Labour's position on tax and spend. It was smart stuff, which opened up a space for public spending while maintaining an overall framework to ensure fiscal responsibility and attract business support. The speech was technical, long and thoughtful. It wasn't really directed at the public, but instead at those paying attention to the thinking behind the party's economic direction. And yet it offered the tantalising possibility of the party opposing austerity while forming an alliance with business. All it needed was some decent easily-summarisable messaging to press it home.

Last month, Keir Starmer made his own speech planting himself firmly against austerity. Again, this was the right call. This is not the time to be raising taxes or tightening belts. We are in a recession. The chief issue is to stimulate demand in the economy, not worry about paying back national debt.

So far, so good. But then Sunak prioritised a corporation tax rise in the Budget. This lost the left of the party in a snap. They were lured into support for austerity because it started by targeting one of their enemies. But they didn't see the trap. Once you accept the belt-tightening narrative, you are now in an austerity discussion. Austerity isn't, as some believe, just about spending cuts. It's about spending cuts and/or tax rises to reduce budget deficits in a time of weak or non-existent growth.

At first Labour held firm. But then, in the face of vocal left-wing criticism, it began to crumble slightly. Dodds told the Guardian she would be open to future corporation tax rises. In terms of policy, this is perfectly reasonable. There may soon be a period of stronger growth in which tax rises would make sense. But in terms of messaging, it served to muddy what had until then been a clear position. The message needed to be simple: no talk of tax rises during a recession. Now it became a question of trying to parse the policy proposals from a series of increasingly nuanced statements.

Sunak's Budget then introduced two major tax rises, but crucially he pushed them into the future. Corporation tax would go up in 2023. Income tax thresholds would be frozen after April this year. At the top rate, that would see many more middle earners enter the top rate of tax. But at the bottom it would freeze the tax-free personal allowance at £12,570, which hits low-paid workers.

What flummoxed Labour here was the date. By pushing it out into the future, Sunak dodged the charge that he was sucking demand from the economy during the recession. But that's not as reassuring as it sounds. We have no idea how the recession is going to play out. New variants of coronavirus could mean we need future lockdowns. Pent-up spending after lockdown may not be as high as expected, or it may be so high that prices go up, making the personal allowance decision even more damaging to low earners. Many people could become unemployed during the gradual removal of furlough this summer. We just don't know what's going to happen, so we shouldn't be making the decisions now. It's an irrelevant debate when we need to be supporting the economy.

Polling then did the rest of the damage. Sunak's Budget was the most popular in a decade, with 55% of people describing it as "fair" in a YouGov poll.

The combination of internal left-wing criticism, Sunak's future implementation and polling support seems to have shifted Labour's position. The party is now clearly planning on supporting the corporation tax rise. Worse, it's going to support the changes to personal allowance. This is entirely the wrong call. This is no time to make set decisions on tax for a future that is extremely chaotic and unpredictable. Doing so accepts the overall narrative of belt-tightening and debt prioritisation.

What we're left with, after a week of gradually shifting rhetoric, is a situation where it really must be impossible for a normal member of the public to ascertain Labour's position. It's genuinely quite difficult even when following these things closely.

This morning the newspapers are full of a hard deal for carers. NHS workers are being given a one per cent hike - below the 1.5% rate of inflation expected by the Office of Budget Responsibility this year. It's completely against good economic or moral sense. It's hard to come up with a policy which contradicts the public's sense of fairness more forcefully, given the year we just had. But this, of course, is the remorseless logic of austerity. "Pay rises in the rest of the public sector will be paused this year due to the challenging economic environment," a government spokesperson said last night.

Labour is opposing it. Of course it is: pay for NHS workers is its bread and butter. And there will be other austerity areas where the same is true - where its instincts, agenda and public opinion align. But focusing only on those makes the party look cynical and without principles, blowing whichever way the wind goes. It needs a firm intellectual foundation underneath the individual political attacks.

These questions are going to define the next period of politics. For Labour to oppose effectively, and get the electoral reward for it, it needs a solid and consistent position, which can be encapsulated in a sentence and which it pursues mercilessly. It had the start of that programme after the Dodds and Starmer speeches. Now it is starting to confuse and obscure it. Just as the foundation was built, they seem to be shattering it.

It's not too late to fix that, but the party really does need to hurry up and do so. This week's equivocation and policy confusion was precisely the wrong way to proceed.

#tax #corporation tax #Labour Party

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republicstandard · 7 years ago

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Welby, Mullally and the Golden Calf of the National Health Service

What is the difference between a Hindu and a bishop of the Church of England? A Hindu worships a sacred cow. An Anglican bishop worships a golden calf. On Sunday, Sarah Mullally, Bishop of London, preached a sermon in praise of her golden calf – Britain’s National Health Service (NHS).

Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, had already galloped ahead of Mullally earlier on and danced orgiastically around the golden calf, calling Theresa May’s government to strip taxpayers of their gold and place it as an offering before the seductive idol of nationalised healthcare.

Fools and bishops rush in where angels fear to tread, and motor mouth Welby challenged politicians to have the "courage" to tax more, borrow more and pump more money into the bloated behemoth of the NHS, despite government debt running at 88 per cent of GDP and his Bible warning us that "the borrower is the slave of the lender".

Mullally’s began her sermon marking the 70th anniversary of the NHS with a statement marinated in irony: "For 900 years, on this site where we stand today, there has been both a hospital and a place of worship." She was preaching at St Bartholomew the Less in London and the service was broadcast on BBC Radio 4.[3]

"St Bart’s traces its roots back to the Augustinian priory that once filled this site. For nine centuries, healing and mercy, compassion and love, the physical and the divine, have brushed up against each other. This very place tells the story of a health service rooted in the Gospel of Jesus Christ," she said. Amen! So why burn incense to a health service rooted in the Gospel of Karl Marx and the socialism of Aneurin Bevan?

Was it because the church was crap at its ministry of healing? At the peak of the great epidemic of AD 260, when 5,000 people died in a day in Rome alone, according to historian William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples, Bishop Dionysius paid tribute to the heroic healthcare provided by Christians.

"Heedless of danger they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbours and cheerfully accepting their pains. Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead," writes Dionysius.

The pagan emperor Julian launched a campaign to institute pagan charities to match the Christians when he realised that Christian efforts at providing healthcare were resulting in converts since paganism simply could not match the healing ministry of Christianity. But there was little or no response to Julian’s urgings "because there were no doctrinal bases or traditional practices for them to build on". This was not because Romans "knew nothing of charity, but that it was not based on service to the gods" writes secular sociologist Rodney Stark.

Christian mission became the catalyst for healthcare wherever the gospel was preached. In India, mission hospitals are still considered as not only some of the best, but also the most generous in offering high-quality healthcare to rich and poor alike.

So why did Britain need nationalised healthcare? Mullally argues that before the golden age of the NHS the poor "didn’t dare call a doctor" or "couldn’t afford to go to hospital" but got "the most basic of palliative care" from workhouses, relying "on home cures and quack medicine for the most terrible illnesses and diseases".

Mullally’s pontificating is patchy at best and a distortion of history at worst. The Routledge anthology of Medicine, Health and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1600–2000 validates her illiteracy of Britain’s medical history – a crying shame for someone who was the UK’s Chief Nursing Officer.

Rather than a paucity of healthcare, "we have an embarras de richesse, for by 1800 there were twenty-eight provincial infirmaries, along with another dozen or so voluntary hospitals in London," notes Adrian Wilson. Moreover, "in medical terms, the voluntary hospitals became pre-eminent both as centres of medical innovation and as sites of medical education" and 40 such hospitals were created by the end of the 18th century, he adds.

James Bartholomew, author of The Welfare State We’re In, agrees.

"Healthcare in Britain was very substantial and impressive prior to 1948. Even the Labour Party pamphlet, which recommended a 'National Service for Health' in 1943, could find little to criticise. There is mention of only one waiting list, for “rheumatic diseases”.

That implies that there were no waiting lists for all the other specialties and no waiting lists to see consultants. There was no mention of any shortage of doctors (which is so chronic now) or, indeed, of nurses. There was "no complaint either, about the quality of care," he observes.

"Why, then, was this system thrown out, to be replaced by a socialist model?" he asks. "Because, said the pamphlet, a good medical service should be 'planned as a whole'," notes Bartholomew, exposing the collectivist demagoguery underlying the creation of the NHS.

As for Mullally’s "quack medicines", the NHS spent £50million on alternative treatments in 2008, a figure expected to rise soon to £200million. The Golden Calf that devours taxpayers’ tithes now dishes out charlatanry that would embarrass a witchdoctor including reiki, mindfulness, aromatherapy, reflexology and homeopathy. Professor Michael Baum protests that "this is like licensing a witches’ brew as a medicine so long as the batwings are sterile".

Mullally’s interpretation of her biblical text from the Good Samaritan is worse than her reading of medical history. She rightly identifies the context of the parable – "enmity between Samaritans and Jews". The Samaritan comes to the aid of the Jew, who is beaten by robbers and left by the wayside. Jesus is asking us to treat our worst enemy as closest neighbour.

However, Mullally carelessly applies this to "any nurse on any ward" who is a Good Samaritan to her patients. She forgets that Nurse Gladys Emmanuel is doing a job she is paid to do, albeit a noble one. "The NHS embodies this Gospel vision of compassion for all, regardless of age or race or religion," trumpets Mullally. Actually, it the pre-NHS medical system was genuinely charitable and compassionate since it was these virtues that kept it funded. For instance, it was normal for consultants to work for many hours each day without pay.

The Good Samaritan applied oil and wine on the wounds of his Jewish neighbour. Mullally’s NHS splurges taxpayers’ money on boob jobs, nose jobs, facelifts and liposuction, while denying life-saving cancer drugs on grounds of cost. In 2014, Mullally’s Good Samaritan spent £52.5million on breast enlargements and £10million on liposuction. Every week, NHS surgeons perform 164 nose jobs, 37 liposuction procedures, 22 facelifts and 273 breast-reshaping operations.

The NHS also spent £20.3million on breast reduction operations, £5.8million on tummy tucks and £5.7million on ear pinning.[7] If you want to change your gender, Mullally’s Good Samaritan will sponsor a vaginoplasty or phalloplasty, as waiting lists for transgender patients demanding genital gender reassignment surgery (GRS) grow longer.

Mullally’s sermon goes on to wax lyrical on the pet theme of inequality.

"Despite the huge progress of the NHS … inequalities still abound. Baby boys born in Blackpool in 2014 can expect to live nine years less than those born in Kensington and Chelsea. Girls in Middlesborough (sic) will live an average of seven years less than girls born in Chiltern."

A colleague, who drew my attention to Mullally’s pious platitudes, pointed out that the Bishop of London was underlining differential in life expectancy between rich and poor areas while dodging the reality that much of the poverty arose from the state-sponsored destruction of the family. In 2007, 68.5% of children were born outside marriage in Knowsley. In Hartlepool, it was 68.1%, in Hull 67% and in Blackpool 66.9%. Compare this to 21.5% children born outside marriage in Harrow, 22.9% in St Albans and 23.6% in Kensington and Chelsea!

The established church will preach the state religion. And the highest-ranking deity in the pantheon of Britain’s civic religion is the NHS. It is "the closest thing the English have to a religion", quipped former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson. As the "most sacred of secular cows", the NHS "has become just about the only way for the state to establish a meaningful relationship between itself and its citizens. It provides the state with its moral purpose, and citizens with an idea not of the 'Good Life, but of the Healthy Life'", writes Tim Black.

"Almost like God himself, the NHS really does aspire to be present in our lives, guiding us through according to the disguised moral imperatives of health and wellbeing," Black concludes.

In the biblical story of Exodus, it is none other than the high priest Aaron who orders the Israelites to strip themselves of gold ornaments to fashion the Golden Calf. People will happily trade wealth for health. Even though today the NHS "is one of the worst healthcare systems in the advanced world – perhaps the very worst", Anglican bishops will happily substitute the gospel of socialist healthcare for the gospel of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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viralhottopics · 8 years ago

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Republicans Obamacare Replacement Just Got A Powerful Enemy

WASHINGTON Provisions in the House Republicans Obamacare replacement billthat would raise insurance costs for older Americans are drawing resistance from the influential seniors lobby.

The American Health Care Act, as Republicans are calling it, would allow insurers to make premiums for older Americans five times what they charge younger workers provided that a states regulations allow for it. Obamacare had capped this ratio, known as an age rating, at 3 to 1.

The measure was chief among the reasons AARP, the nations largest organization for older Americans,cited in explaining its opposition to the House bill on Tuesday evening.

Older Americans need affordable health care services and prescriptions,AARP Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond said in a statement. This plan goes in the opposite direction, increasing insurance premiums for older Americans and not doing anything to lower drug costs.

AARP, which has nearly 38 million members ages 50 and older, is also firmly opposed to a pair of major changes to Medicaid that the House bill includes. One is a rollback of Obamacares Medicaid expansion, which made the program available to millions of low-income adults, many of them seniors, who had no insurance before. The other is a new Medicaid funding formula that could leave states on the hook for more and more money, a report from the left-leaningCenter on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded Tuesday. That might force states to make cuts that hurt seniors, many of whom rely on Medicaid for nursing home care and other health services.

Medicaid cuts could impact people of all ages and put at risk the health and safety of 17.4 million children and adults with disabilities and seniors by eliminating much needed services that allow individuals to live independently in their homes and communities, LeaMond said. This harmful legislation would make health care less secure and less affordable.

AARP used its considerable political power to help pass Obamacare in 2010, despite the opposition of many members about 400,000 left the organization in protest. AARPs objection to key elements of the Republican bill to replace the landmark law could prove just as influential.

[AARP] backed it and paid the price for backing it, so why not support it against repeal? said Fred Lynch, a professor at Claremont McKenna College and author of One Nation Under AARP. The Congress is genuinely afraid of age power, and theyd just as soon let the sleeping giant go on sleeping.

The only possible leader right now is AARP, so its sort of in their hands, he said.

The mammoth organization has already registered its opposition to the two measures in letters to Congress in late January and early February.

AARP premiered a new video advertisement for the campaign on Monday, suggesting it was ramping up its efforts to kill the provision.

In the tongue-in-cheek ad that runs for just over a minute, a man chopping wood alongside a squirrel named Charlie expresses his anger at the age tax.

You know, Charlie and I were watching the news this morning, and they said that Congress has just introduced a new age-rating bill, the wood-chopping narrator says. And I was like, What the heck is age rating? Then Charlie explained that its Washington politician-speak for overcharging older Americans for their health insurance while lining the insurance companies pockets.

The ad is part of anadvocacy campaign AARP launched Feb. 15 to specifically combat a rise in the age rating, which it is calling an age tax. At the time, the organization encouraged its members to call those in Congress who were active in drafting the health care legislation to oppose the rating provision.

Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), right, addresses questions about the American Health Care Act with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Tuesday.

AARPs concern about how the Republican bill would affect Americans 50 and older is well-founded, according to two health care experts.

Across the board, what it does is shift costs from younger people to older people, said Timothy Jost, a leading health reform expert and emeritus professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law.

Republicans introduced the proposal with the goal of enticing younger Americans to buy health insurance and rebalance insurance risk pools, according to Jost.

The bill would also create a tax credit to buy insurance that increases based on age.But the tax credits are, at most, twice as large for older Americans while the premiums could be five times higher.

It is sending seniors a 2-foot rope to get themselves out of a 10-foot hole, said Sabrina Corlette, a professor at Georgetown Universitys Health Policy Institute.

Corlette predicted that under the Republican plan, many Americans in their 50s and early 60s would be unable to pay for private insurance and would end up going without coverage. That risks driving up medical debt, which could lead to more bankruptcies.

Some might delay retirement to keep employer-sponsored insurance, Corlette suggested.

If there is less coverage as people get older, people … are less likely to leave a job to care for a family member or pursue their own business, she added.

Many of the older Americans hardest hit by these changes live in rural, Republican-leaning areas, according to aninteractive analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Under the House plan, 60-year-olds earning $30,000 a year would see their tax credits drop 75 percent or more in most of Arizona and large swaths of western Nebraska. The least affected states include solidly Democratic Washington, Vermont, New York and Massachusetts.

Kaiser Family Foundation

A map demonstrating the House bill’s effect on tax credits to buy health insurance for 60-year-old Americans earning $30,000 annually.

They didnt run this by the politicians. They didnt look at it seriously in terms of its effect on Republican voters and [Donald] Trump voters, said Jost, who is also a contributing editor at Health Affairs.

AARP represents an older demographic that leans Republican and tended to vote for Trump in November.

Republican senators spent much of their time Tuesday dodging questions about the specifics of the House Republican bill, saying they needed more time to read it.

Asked about the language in the bill that would allow insurers to charge their oldest customers five times what they charge younger ones, Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said hes fine with it.

Five-to-ones been a standard part of the process and what it was several years ago, he said. No, five-to-one doesnt concern me at all.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) said hes still studying the bill and that theres a lot Im not wild about, but the increase in premiums for older Americans wasnt one of them.

The current price controls are clearly not working, he said. Getting away from price controls would probably improve the viability of the individual market.

Pressed on the fact that it could mean older workers will have to postpone their retirement if the Republican bill passes, Toomey said, I will leave it at that.

Unlike her colleagues, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) expressed concern about the change.

Well it depends on how you structure the credit because, in fact, seniors are more expensive, but if you offset that by giving them a greater credit you can make sure that theyre not hurt by the reality that seniors use more health care, she said.

But Collins acknowledged that preliminary analyses of the credits afforded under the bill to older customers suggest they wont keep pace with the higher premiums.

Well, thats an issue that I have. I need more information about the credits and also about the fact that it looks like the credits are the same amount whether you make the bottom of pay scale, or income scale, or the top.