Can you imagine reading a story to your keiki about a Robin Hood who steals from the poor to give to the rich? If you support the latest Republican tax plan, you’re teaching your children that it’s OK to be what you’d call a heartless criminal in any other situation.
Wisdom, compassion and integrity are being thrown out the window by Trump and lockstep Republicans whose biggest goal is to feather their nests and those of campaign donors. They’re getting away with it because of citizens who continue to blindly support a compassionless, oil- and gun-controlled Congress and a groping, nationalistic, unstable president whose closest associates, including his family, have colluded with a foreign government to destroy our democracy.
George H.W. Bush called it “Voodoo Economics,” but Republicans aren’t listening to voices once considered rationally conservative. Their giveaway of American resources and health to the excessively rich and casting aside of American values has captivated a citizenry brain-washed and motivated by FOX-induced fear and misinformation rather than truth and compassion. Right-wing stalwarts — many who are no doubt good-hearted but with a clear lack of political discernment — continue to stridently support leaders who are shredding time-tested mores and rules that protect our people and the stability of our society. What’s most breathtaking is that they believe those leaders care about them when all they do is sweet-talk constituents and kowtow to handlers making them dance for campaign cash.
Fact: Cutting taxes for the richest and services for the rest of us does not translate to lifting all boats. “Trickle down” economics is a misleading name for an almost universally disparaged theory embraced by those who benefit from the wishful thinking of their political base. What the theory does (in reality — not reality TV) is allow the richest people on Earth to buy private jets and spec homes in far-flung places where they’ll often never live, in communities they can’t relate to. Shoots, it allows them to buy whole neighborhoods. And it allows the filthiest rich to plunder natural resources including critical, irreplaceable ecosystems and agricultural lands with even less financial risk — just so they can feather their obscenely abundant nests.
That’s not to say that many wealthy people aren’t generous. Many are, and many don’t support the tax cut plan passed by the 51 beholden Republican senators in a tax bill that will literally kill some of their fellow Americans. But those selfish, myopic Republican leaders who were elected to protect We the People are, in reality, protecting individuals and corporations who have enough money to feed, educate, and provide decent medical care to every child in this country without painful sacrifice, but only if they’re moved to do so; and many never will unless mandated by Congress to pay their fair share of taxes.
The Republican tax plan has “something for everyone” — more of everything for those who don’t need it and less of everything for those who do. That theft is affecting us all including citizens who naively believe that they and their families can live safely and freely in a society that’s being squeezed and divided by what people can, or cannot, afford.
Whatever your politics, call those 51 senators and the president. Tell them their tax cut plan is dangerous to you, your ohana and your country.
Janice Palma-Glennie is a resident of Kona.