It Started as a Tax Cut. Now It Could Change American Life.

[CousinIT]

...as the bill has been rushed through Congress with scant debate, its far broader ramifications have come into focus, revealing a catchall legislative creation that could reshape major areas of American life, from education to health care.

Some of this re-engineering is straight out of the traditional Republican playbook. Corporate taxes, along with those on wealthy Americans, would be slashed on the presumption that when people in penthouses get relief, the benefits flow down to basement tenements.

Some measures are barely connected to the realm of taxation, such as the lifting of a 1954 ban on political activism by churches and the conferring of a new legal right for fetuses in the House bill — both on the wish list of the evangelical right.

With a potentially far-reaching dimension, elements in both the House and Senate bills could constrain the ability of states and local governments to levy their own taxes, pressuring them to limit spending on health care, education, public transportation and social services. In their longstanding battle to shrink government, Republicans have found in the tax bill a vehicle to broaden the fight beyond Washington.

The result is a behemoth piece of legislation that could widen American economic inequality while diminishing the power of local communities to marshal relief for vulnerable people — especially in high-tax states like California and New York, which, not coincidentally, tend to vote Democratic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/business/republican-tax-cut.html?_r=0

[enough]

1. Worse and worse. NT

[mindfulNJ]

2. We are screwed if this passes

It will be the beginning of the end of our democracy.

[Dave Starsky]

4. Oh, that ship set sail a long time ago.

This will just be the coup de grace that finishes us all.

[RKP5637]

3. And how major unrest starts in countries. n/t