Federal Government’s Attack on American Progress, Technology, Ingenuity & Creativity
Money is made possible only by the men who produce.
– Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The abomination peddled to the American people as a tax cut at the end of 2017 by the anti-progress, anti-metropolis, socialist, redistribution-of-wealth Republican corporate puppets that handed a bill to the most productive and creative regions of this nation to pay for nanny-state corporate handouts is a blight on not only our economic freedoms but an outright attack on the true power centers of this republic. Piled high on their submental propaganda that technology and international trade is a modern evil intent on destroying the free enterprise of the 21st century, this law is antithetical to its authors’ purported ideology that was tossed where all ideologies go whence power calls, in the trash bin of history.
By handing over a shameless gift to the largest corporations in America while ignoring smaller ones — I am the proud owner of a corporation, Vincary Media, which will not be seeing any trimming of my tax rate from 35 to 21 percent as the multi-billion dollar ones are — what will be forever known as the draconian Trump Tax Hike of 2018 penalizes those who live in the highest tax brackets; in other words the greatest achievers, most productive cities, the media and technology centers, the bastions of trade and commerce that prop up the rest of this nation internally rotting from atavistic energy concerns to a barely breathing manufacturing (and I use that term as loosely as one can muster without bursting into paroxysms of laughter) hub.
Simply put; this ten-thousand-dollar cap on state and local tax deductions, is in effect a discriminatory double-tax on the most important regions of the United States; more particularly New York, New Jersey, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, or to bang this point home ever more succinctly, the nation’s largest, most productive, creative and thus cutting-edge centers.
I live in one of those centers.
For the first time since writing this column (est. 1997), and certainly the first time since having incorporated as a free-lancer (est. 2003), I was informed by my accountant that I will be paying more taxes this year. Not during two Democratic administrations and a Republican two-term one did I receive this call. I am going to pay more taxes. Let that sink in if you voted for any Republican (fiscal conservatives my ass) at any point over the past decade. Thank you. Appreciate it. Excuse me while I go kick Rush Limbaugh in his drug-addled balls.
Of course, this is the culmination of the sophomoric economic idiocy of our game show president, but really that drooling moron is window dressing compared to a congress that has previously been hijacked by self-styled tax guru, Grover Norquist, who somehow (good for him) got these dinks to sign a pledge to “never raise taxes,” but is now clearly sucking at the teat of big business that would make the ghost of Calvin Coolidge wish he were a whore at the Mardi Gras parade. By the way, Norquist, like me, who lives in high-rent Washington D.C., is going to pay more taxes this year (good for him).
Everything that keeps this nation alive economically comes from urban centers. Even the preponderance of cash that is sent to farmers all over the fruited plain, as everything grown in this country is subsidized by tax money, and where does all that come from? You and me, well more like me since I live in a higher taxed area, but it sure ain’t corporations with their off-shore bank accounts and massive write-offs (corporations never paid 35 percent taxes, on average is was 14 percent and soon it will be in the single digits), while the rest of us suckers continue to fork over basically the same rates, which will rise in a decade but remain cut for corporations.
You want to know how funny this all is; Donald Trump’s precious Twitter was invented and founded in San Francisco, one of the highest taxed cities in America. Those people are F-U-C-K-E-D.
The queer aspect of this is it began under the watch of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who has claimed in the past that he was inspired by Ayn Rand’s hoary screeds on the injustices of laws created by governments to support weakness, usually reserved for economics, as a result of ingenuity and creativity. Rand’s novels, most notably, The Fountainhead (wildly overrated combination of penis envy meets a preternatural industrial revolution jones) and Atlas Shrugged (painfully underrated ode to individualism and the bloated natural order of exceptionalism), deal with the intervention of government against the will of man, or the private state, which looks, by nature (according to Rand, and a theory of which I enthusiastically subscribe, Objectivism) runs counter to the tenets of a free society.
Once you single out one economic swath of the collective field to bear the burden, you are slanting it, or in more legal terms, practicing cronyism or racketeering. In a very binding way (and a tax law is as binding as it gets, bubba) what this congress and our president did was take away the motivation for the centers of our commerce, education, art and ingenuity to continue its greatness in order to prop up what Rand calls (and I am sure Ryan, when he was all cool in his, “Hey, I’m a young conservative, look at my pecs,” period) moochers.
Rand’s novel proffers that the best and brightest protest by removing their minds and talents from this mooching society obsessed with ancient rituals like coal mining and Catholicism (Rand was card-carrying atheist, who thought Jesus was a sucker, something Republicans always fail to point out) and see how the rest of society fares. Spoiler alert, it crumbles.
Fun Ayn Rand fact, she scrapped her screeds and went for the real money in Hollywood writing banal scripts for B-movies, another place that will be fist-raped by this tax law.
And lest anyone use the pointed argument that my beef is with my absurdly high state tax, I remind you that if I go to Cabo San Lucas and choose a hotel on the beach, and then a room facing the ocean, I expect to pay more. I expect that being 34 miles from the greatest city on planet earth, with access to the best education, art, industry, technology etc., to pay more, but I also expect to have the write-offs commensurate with the rest of the country in which the property values are equal to the less than ideal area in which they find themselves.
Now those who choose cynicism and paranoia as a hobby, and I am all for that, may say this is Republicans and Trump penalizing states, especially urban and suburban (educated, cultured, high-level-producers), social progressive thinkers, media centers, and those who openly mock their knuckle-dragging bullshit, to pay for not supporting them. They will never pay the political price for having screwed us. And they are right.
But I say to them and you and all Americans; remember that waaaaayyyy more people died, it’s like ten-to-one in almost all calculations, in WWII (and every ensuing war for that matter) in New York, New Jersey and California. We have sacrificed and created enough.
Time for Atlas to shrug.
Do yourself no favors and “like” this idiot at facebook.com/jc.author
James Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of “Deep Tank Jersey,” “Fear No Art,” “Trailing Jesus,” “Midnight For Cinderella” and “Y”. “Shout It Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon”
And coming in June, 2018; “Accidently Like a Martyr – The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon”
