Trump Running Scared

To the editor:

There are not enough pages in the Fayette County Record to list all of the facts and reasons why the letters to the editor of the array of extreme right wing MAGA Republicans are replete with a multitude of half-truths and lies. For example, the proposed funding of additional IRS agents opposed by GOP lawmakers is dedicated to auditing incomes of more than $400,000 because those upper incomes typically underpay the taxes they legitimately owe. By the same token, proposed increases in taxes would only apply to incomes greater than $400,000. That would increase tax revenues in the billions and help fund child tax credits that not only eliminate childhood poverty but also bring needed relief to middle income families. In the same vein, GOP lawmakers refuse to either modestly increase the social security tax or the income ceiling that would enhance and extend the viability of social security beyond the present lives of the baby boomers and the very lives of younger workers.

That increase in tax revenues would also allow middle income families to afford the resulting reduced premiums of health insurance provided by the Affordable Care Act also known as “Obamacare” now supported by 70% of Americans many of them Republican voters. However, MAGA lawmakers oppose both the child tax credit and the ACA credit for middle income families and they support the funding of what the good Dr. Mueller recently and accurately called “Medicare Disadvantage” that especially harms rural America where there is a shortage of available hospitals and doctors and that diminishes the funding available for traditional Medicare in order for taxpayers to subsidize the needless profits of Medicare Advantage health insurance companies. Republican lawmakers want to privatize everything like the private equity firms taking over hospitals especially rural hospitals substituting nurse practitioners for pediatric physicians and forcing the pediatrician to sign off on their treatment without even examining and visiting the patient in order to maximize their needless profits at the cost and risk to the patient’s health.

Those right wing writers blame Biden for inflation when most of the inflation was caused by Trump’s failure to require the immediate production of N-95 masks under the National Defense Production Act (when told that the corona virus would primarily attack people of color working lower skill jobs) and his months of mendacious self-centered denial of the seriousness of the pandemic and Trump’s refusal to actively encourage vaccination, despite the fact that, after the vaccine was made available, the great majority of the those in ICUs or dying were the unvaccinated and despite the fact his U.S. Trade Representative, Peter Navarro, repeatedly warning him in the first weeks of the Corona virus coming to the U.S. that America may lose a “million souls.”

Republican lawmakers refuse to pass ability to pay income tax rates on the upper incomes of all kinds such as the stock-buybacks of big corporations that were the major beneficiaries of Trump’s needless corporate tax breaks that drove up the federal debt and interest rates with it and such as characterizing the earnings of private equity handlers like J.D. Vance as capital gains taxed at rates lower than the tax rates paid by rank and file workers.

Those ability to pay income tax rates would help reduce the federal debt of what is essentially an almost bare bones federal budget which in turn would lower interest rates and, perhaps more importantly, help the U.S. make the public investments in research and development and infrastructure and defense that China is making in order to attain superiority over the U.S.

Despite Trump’s lies, today’s gasoline prices are now about 50 cents per gallon higher when Trump left office (if one compares the portion of the price at the pump for regular gasoline and not the taxes imposed by a given state).During the pandemic, monopolistic Big Oil learned how to purposely produce less but still make record profits and that price gouging continues to this day. The simple solution to U.S. gasoline prices is to return to the banning of exporting U.S. domestic oil (but not natural gas which Europe needs to defeat Trump’s pal Putin) and watch the price of gasoline at the pump fall thanks in part because under Biden,America has produced more oil than any of his predecessors including Trump. But GOP lawmakers beholden to the largesse of Big Oil (Trump publicly promising to deregulate all oil production, including environmental protection, if Big Oil CEOs and lobbyists contribute $1 billion to his campaign) will never vote to return to keeping U.S. oil in the U.S. for Americans to enable Americans to affordably drive the cars and trucks needed for a living.

Republican lawmakers will never break up the monopolistic corporate cartels of Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Health Insurance, Big Banks, and BidAgri-Business (the latter paying to Montana ranchers the equivalent of $100 per unit and then turning around and selling the same beef for $400 per unit) that have been short supplying and price gouging American families and small businesses for decades that makes 8% inflation look like peanuts when it comes to the cost of living.

Trump is running scared of Vice-President Kamala Harris not only at the prospect of a future debate that he is cowardly trying to avoid but primarily because of her proven record as a prosecutor and Attorney General where she made private for profit colleges akin to Trump University accountable for defrauding college students and made the big banks pay homeowners for their predator loans and took on Big Pharma in California. J.D. Vance is also running scared of her running mate, Tim Walz, who as Governor of Minnesota successfully championed the needs of working and middle income families.

So, if you are truly concerned about the cost of living for working and middle income families and your livelihood and national and economic and environmental security in America, closely follow those debates and then vote for Democratic candidates up and down the entire ballot in November.

John W. Mikus Houston