This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

This one is really very easy. With age comes experience and poverty. You’ve heard it all before. Up until yesterday, all of the projections said. Trump’s big, beautiful murder bill would add five to seven trillion dollars to the deficit over ten years. Then suddenly, just like magic. A fairy came down from the Congressional Budget Office saying, “Oh no, it would only add 2.5 trillion over ten years. Funny how that works, isn’t it? After criticism and a harsh push back, the Administration comes up with glowing new projections.

I’ve seen it all before. When I was living in Minnesota, the Minnesota Vikings needed a new football stadium. The revenue from scratch off lotto games would generate 10 to 14 million dollars, they said. A .25 cent tax on mixed drinks would bring in another five million. They even went so far as to say, cities with winning football teams are happier and more productive.  If that were so, I pondered, we should build two football stadiums, and all be deliriously happy.

They had it all planned out. A football stadium and an entertainment district with bars and stores and hotels, with a metro station and a new metro line. It was going to bring jobs, jobs, jobs. Alibi, part time, part time, part time. Low, low. low paying jobs only during football season. But this was going to be the greatest thing since Jack Daniels learned how to make whiskey. But in their projections, most everything was dependent on the state and the county funding. That new metro rail and ultra-modern metro station that would have to be paid for by the feds and the county. Of course, certain tax abatement would be necessary for the entertainment district.

It turned out the Real Estate developer, the main proponent behind the plan was already buying up property. Ready to make a killing, once the deal went through. Then the lotto number projections went down. Not 10 to 14  million, but maybe 9 or 10 million. Then maybe 5 million and then 2 million. Ditto for the drink tax projections. The government paid and paid, while the developer made and made a fortune. Figures don’t lie but liar’s figure.

I trust the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office about as much as I trust Joni Ernst loves babies and sick grandmothers. The ghost of the former Conservatives haunt the Administration, and they must be placated with crooked numbers. A crutch to carry them home to explain to the weed benders and beer drinkers. Why, I was told it would only cost $2.5 Trillion! I’m shocked! Shocked I say! I never would have voted for that bill if I had known it would add 5 to 7 trillion dollars to the deficit. Yet that was the forecasted number EVERYONE was using, until yesterday.

This is Trump’s big bamboozle and his signature act of treason and mayhem…would Donald Trump lie to get what he wants? Would the corrupt and profiteers lie to you?

In Alabama, the tax system works almost exclusively for the benefit of the affluent. Rather than inconvenience land and property owners, most of whom don’t live in Alabama. The state uses sales taxes for funding. Every year at budget time, they forecast those sales tax numbers. Rarely, do they ever match up with the amount of revenue generated. The legislature can proudly propose sane numbers for education, but if the monies aren’t there. Aww, we can only give you 75 cents on the dollar. The state fair makes $30,000 every day, if it doesn’t rain or get too hot.

A tariff is a national sales tax on you! Another way of shifting the tax burden away from the wealthy and onto the poor and the formerly middle class. And if the revenue doesn’t arrive as anticipated. We will be forced to make even more cuts. Sadly, we don’t want to do it, but have no other alternative.

In Illinois and Chicago specifically, they are struggling to come up with a plan to keep mass transit viable. Huge revenue gaps and the only source of revenue is to raise ticket prices. Let’s see, Homewood to State Street? That’s $ 59.00. Tax cuts and deferred maintenance, until finally the chickens come home to roost. Chicago needs mass transit; it isn’t an option. But let someone else pay for it.

In America’s inner cities, armed gangs of murderous teenagers sell drugs openly and generally do as they please. There is no other opportunity for them. In Montgomery, the schools were so bad that calling them a warehouse was too generous. When I was there, probably a third to half of the High School students were functionally illiterate. Without an education, what alternative is there for them? Automation and computerization means less jobs and less future. But thanks to the Second Amendment murder rates can still skyrocket!

The Trump Junta plans to claw back $9 billion in funds already allocated. Money for science and education and investments in our future. Investments which bring gains to our society. The Kennedy/Johnson Administration spent over $20 billion (A fortune at the time) putting men on the moon. Much of the research was done in Universities by students. And all the United States citizens ever got out of the deal were laptop computers, the Internet and cell phones, plus a twenty-year head start on modern technology. That’s it! That’s all we got along with a 1,000-year leap forward in science and understanding of the universe all around us.

How we will laugh someday about primitive cable TV. Miles and miles and miles of wires, really? People had phones attached to their walls? But what we are witnessing is a pull back, a retreat from the future. A draw down and an admission that Capitalism is failing. That Capitalism can no longer supply the goods and needs of our society any more. Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull) said, “The white man is very good at making things. But he’s not very good at distributing them.”

Greed Uber Allis has taken over, and the parasite is overcoming its host. Like a game of Jenga, you can only pull out so many blocks before it all falls down. The answer is obvious, but nearly impossible to accomplish in the age of mass propaganda. Let’s worry about Transgenders in high school sports. Let’s worry about the ten commandments in classrooms, while we starve children and the elderly. Lets build a big fucking wall and ignore the crime in our inner cities. Let’s ignore the poor and necessitous. Capitalism is losing the only advantage it ever had and becoming an anachronism of its former self.

  “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” – John F. Kennedy