20160726 – To the alienated Republican voter

The Republican Party implemented a platform of obstructionism before Obama’s inauguration day.  That obstructionism has been held steadfast as the central foundation of the Party.  What innovative legislation has a Republican controlled House and Senate proposed in the last sixteen years to address the significant issues of our country during periods of majority? 

The Republican Party shifted in the 1950’s to combine nationalism and religion post WWII to assist big business interests to confuse mathematical and scientific macroeconomic realities in the American people to decrease the power of labor, dominate the globe through partnered corporate-military imperialism, and market a flag and a cross so that the vast majority of Americans vote against their economic and social best interests.  The Democratic Party soon followed along as a pro-business party as faith bedded nationalism and the money in politics started to dwarf any other issue as television became king.  This is the One Party system we live under.  Both are culpable, but at its root it started with Billy Graham, Eisenhower, and Vice President Richard Nixon after the technological advances of WWII sparked the economy.   

The Republican cult of Ronald Reagan is the ultimate modern iteration of these policies which mathematically produce national debt, increase poverty, consolidate wealth, and sacrifice long term good of the nation and our planet for the short term gains of a tiny percentage of the Earth’s population.  Post-Regan Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama have all played forms of this game, but the Progressive agenda pushing from the far left, which used to be center left in FDR’s era, has forced the Democratic Party to adapt.  Has it fully, no, but the economic policy from the Democratic side of the aisle of: a single payer option, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, ending citizens united, addressing public university tuition as a hindrance to our labor force, equal pay for equal work, ending private prisons, and the TPP are all policies to address the gargantuan problem that trickle-down economics and policies of the Eisenhower/Graham coalition are structurally flawed in their extreme implementation and are an abject failure causing the global consolidation of wealth and power.  Furthermore the One-Party system’s intentional obfuscation of what constitutes wealthy or why public tax resources are scarce and where all the wealth created over the last thirty years is hinders the American people from comprehending how such progressive policies could be funded in an economy no longer married to the interests of the wealthiest global citizens and not suffer massive inflation largely due to the advances in technology capable of meeting the basic survival needs of the average human being. 

The greatest value of the Republican Party in the counter balance is mathematical conservatism that a government cannot spend its way into solutions without interdependence with the private economy of its citizens.  The problem is that the Republican Party long ago abandoned mathematical conservatism and science based policy.  The top wealth holders have extricated their self-interest from the U.S. population.  The stagflation of the 1970’s was not cured by trickledown economics.  Stagflation was cured by advances in technology and changes in global political markets. 

What the modern economy truly needs is a global tax on capital.  The misunderstanding of how functional income tax rates work for both corporations, high income individuals, middle class, and those living in poverty is part of the big business agenda.  The One Party system does not want you to understand the math or the functional results of that math which cannot be cured after thirty plus years of implementation by shifting the burden of correction on wealth created here forward; we must also target the giant pile of wealth created during those thirty years.

Without getting too wonky, I have spent my adult life as a CPA.  I have audited publicly traded companies, large and medium sized private businesses, non profits, large and small governmental entities, prepared the tax returns for corporations, estates, and individuals, and worked as the controller of a large private company.  I have seen behind the wall of what a lot of different shades of the economic spectrum pay in employee and employer compensation in addition to understanding the tax code and governmental budgeting on a level probably beyond the average citizen.  The concise end result is that the deductions high income individuals get to utilize prior to their income ever being determined are far more pertinent to the equation than the tax rate as long as that tax rate is within its modern historical standard deviation.  The profit-based healthcare system is the largest unnecessary and dysfunctional tax the American people pay inside both the private and public economies.  The lobbying power of big business has manipulated the tax code for this to happen.  Without a coordinated global tax on capital in addition to income by the world’s superpowers while also eliminating tax shelters in countries like Ireland and Bermuda the mammoth aggregation of wealth sleeping in banks doing very little for the Earth’s population will not functionally change.  Most importantly as the leader of the globe’s economy America must lead the charge to account for the planet Earth as capital on the balance sheet of humanity rather than an asset of Wall Street to avoid the extinction of our species.  This change in accounting is a function of both generally accepted accounting principles affecting financial reporting and tax code in a conducive political habitat.

So in short: change deductions, fix profit-based healthcare, fix lobbying and citizens united, and implement a global tax on capital that recognizes the Earth as equity owned by humanity and not firms.  Those should be the pillars of how-do-we-fix-this-mess. The elected officials of the Republican Party are across the board in opposition to these solutions.  This is largely due to the fact that the elected officials of both parties have been farmed to serve business over citizens since the aforementioned shift in the 1950’s.  The average person sees the end result of but not cause of the problems, agrees across the aisle far more often than television would lead us to believe on solutions, and on each side of the aisle are disgusted with both parties.  (i.e. the popularity of Sanders and Trump)

A democracy is a living organism.  Throwing one’s hands up as I will not vote or that the only insertion of our minds into the political arena is on election day is a false understanding of democracy.  There is no us and them, there is only us.  Arguing only blue or red often in concepts engineered by both sides of the aisle as wedge issues like religion, patriotism, or nationalism is the language of alienated complacency.  Misunderstanding that in this election we have large numbers of Republicans upset Trump got the nomination by following the will of the electorate and we have large numbers of Democrats upset Clinton cheated in what appears to be a rigged primary to hinder the will of the electorate.  Both nominees are candidates of war, bombing, and business.  This is no massive victory for the proletariat. 

The One Party system seeks sheep who vote the way they are told or do not vote at all.  The best we can do is see the machine at work and fight never believing that our vote means that we one hundred percent agree with what a party stands for or that ideas become moot into a cauldron of absolutes.  Mathematics matter, ideas matter, communication matters.  Voting is the least we can do.  Republicat or Democran either way we are called to use or minds for understanding the roots of how we arrived at the moment, not to silence all discussion in frivolous rhetoric, but to evolve.