Today is another day that ends in “y,” so the weak-kneed “Republicans” of the GOP establishment, emboldened after four years of fighting the America First revolt on behalf of Chinese oligarchs and grown men who wear beanies in Silicon Valley, are making yet another underhanded attempt to derail Donald Trump.
You can’t have a $2,000 stimulus check, say the former cruise vacation salesmen at TheBulwarkDispatchReview. They’ve even managed to attract some neophyte followers to their dying political cause, like mosquitos to the bug zapper.
Why can’t you have a $2000 stimulus check? Well, that’s socialism! And socialism—get this—is bad!
I’m no socialist, but I’m also not into worshipping the false god of “free market” capitalism. After all it’s not really a “free market” if the government can order it to a grinding halt, is it? Ask the small business owners whose livelihoods have been destroyed forever upon the whims of certain governors and Dr. Fauci, who has spent more time on the cable news circuit than following The Science™, how free they’re feeling about our supposed “free market.” True “free market” capitalism is sacrificing our small businesses on the altars of Amazon and other big corporations to the tune of $68 trillion in wealth.
That aside, here’s what the anti-Trumpers aren’t telling you: It’s your damn money, anyway.
If you pay your taxes, unlike that #NeverTrump beanbag Rick Wilson over at the Lincoln Project, a $2,000 check is merely a tax rebate. The government, which you keep in business, put you out of business. The least it can do is to return some of the money raised from its annual April shakedown.
The battle over stimulus checks is one of faux outrage and it is intentional, terrible branding on behalf of the old guard GOP.
Nobody—not even the staunchest Trump haters—fought the famed Trump tax cuts of 2017, which coincidentally saved the average American about $2000 per annum. Jonah Goldberg and friends didn’t preen and clutch their pearls about “socialism” then. But somehow, once your money crosses the magic Rubicon from your bank account into the IRS’s, it is under no circumstance allowed to be returned to you, lest D.C. turns into Leningrad.
The GOP Establishment, which I’ll remind you is fighting for its political life in Georgia, could have handed itself the easiest political victory in recent memory.
It could have presented a clean bill to Donald Trump, which he promised he would sign, with a $2,000 stimulus check for struggling Americans. It could have branded this bill as the “American Economic Freedom Tax Rebate Act,” or the “Just This Once We’re Pretending to Care About the Working Class Tax Give Back Act,” or even the “Money We Promised You We Wouldn’t Spend Funding Abortions Tax Refund Act.” For once, the GOP could have been on the offense, forcing the Democrats either to capitulate to its will, or deny struggling Americans cold hard cash in a time of desperation.
Instead, many of the same establishmentarians who demand you vote red in Georgia to save the GOP’s bacon, are busy doing mental gymnastics to figure out why you shouldn’t receive a stimulus check, and proving that they’re not very limber as they hand the Democrats an easy score in the messaging department.
What’s more important than saving struggling Americans from certain demise, you might ask?
Well, instead of giving your $2000 back to you, any cash back you might receive has been rolled into this year’s budget bill.
That $1.4 trillion monstrosity provides $25 million of your money for gender studies in Pakistan, because why save American small businesses when, as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) so eloquently explained, girls in Pakistan can’t inherit property?
“Pakistan is a place I really worry about,” he said. “Eighty-five countries a woman can’t open up a bank account without her husband’s signature. She can’t inherit property. If you’re a young girl in Pakistan life is pretty tough.”
I’m no U.S. senator, but America is a place I really worry about. I think life is “pretty tough” here too, especially right now.
And we can’t forget about the $671.5 billion of your money that our lawmakers allocated for generic “defense spending,” which is simply politicianspeak for “summer vacation homes for Raytheon and Boeing executives who donated vast sums to our campaigns.”
With that kind of cash for defense, why limit gender studies to Pakistan? Maybe the troops, who will surely continue to occupy almost all of the Middle East on the upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11, can teach every woman in the entire region how to open a bank account without her husband.
Every year, the “fiscal conservatives” in the GOP establishment waste your money on their ridiculous pet projects, and every year, people like me complain about it.
But this year is different.
This is the year that the GOP establishment sat idly by while you’ve been wiped out and kicked to the curb. This is the year they’ve proven that they absolutely do not care whether you live or die.
The ruling class might be getting richer on the not-so-free market while you get poorer, and maybe Pakistan doesn’t need that gender studies program. But at least Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg stopped Donald Trump from returning to you $2,000 of your own money, averting what surely would have been a socialist calamity.