I’m taking a week off here at RJsCorner. See you again on March 4

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I need to get a few rants out of my system before I explode. 😳 That is what this Sunday post is about.

Morally Incompatible

John Pavlovitz is becoming one of my primary “Go-To” guys on the Internet. He is a very popular minister and public speaker who does not parse words on things he is passionate about. His Twitter message above is a line in the sand for him, and it is becoming my line too.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that all of you who voted for the current incompetent are automatically in the MAGA fold. But if you still support him after all the disgrace he has spewed out then maybe we are simply morally incompatible.

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About Income Taxes

America invented progressive taxation. And there was a time when leading American politicians were proud to proclaim their willingness to tax the wealthy, not just to raise revenue, but to limit excessive concentration of economic power.

“It is important,” said Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, “to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes” — some of them, he declared, “swollen beyond all healthy limits.”

Source: New York Times

The quote above by Paul Krugman reminds those who study our nation’s history, that this is not the first time America’s wealth has been concentrated in the hands of so few. It has now come to the point that the top 0.1 percent have as much as the bottom 90 percent. It has never been that skewed even during the “Robber Baron” years.

Maybe I am wrong, but I think the time is FINALLY ripe to rebalance things. After all, how much discretionary income does one person really need?

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There Is Reason For Hope

Mr. Trump’s hard-core base is large enough to dominate the Republican Party, at least for now, but it is not large enough to dominate the country. In the long run, a third or so of the country cannot effectively govern the other two-thirds with an unpopular agenda and a Twitter account.

Mr. Trump will almost surely achieve less legislatively in the second half of his term than he did in the first, when Republicans controlled both branches of Congress — and even then their record was not impressive.

Source:New York Times

The Republican party was shrinking before Trump took office and as a result of him, it will likely shrink significantly more in the next few years. Yes, maybe two-thirds of the of a shrinking GOP base still consider him their savior but even that almost certainly guarantees he will be a one-term president. That is if the other two-thirds of the electorate turn on election day.

In fact, we may just come to thank the MAGA folks for showing us just how unbalanced our branches of government have become. I have hope that things will change pretty dramatically come 2021 and beyond and we will get back to a nation of all the people, instead of a greedy ruling elite.

But Let’s Be Realistic

It is rumored that the Mueller Investigation will finally release its report to the Attorney General this coming week. I hope that he has found so many smoking guns that it is impossible for Congress to ignore them. But, in reality, since the report is presented only to the Attorney General, who has sworn his loyalty to Trump, it’s not hard to imagine that he will do everything he can to squash any damaging information and not release much of anything to Congress. Let’s not get our hopes up in that regard. We may have to live with this poor excuse for a President 23 more months.

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