Trump_is_Mentally_fit

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/05/20/republican-party-torn-apart-by-trumps-new-tax-bill/ Class conflict has erupted in Trump’s America – within his own Republican Party. The party controls both houses of Congress, as well as the presidency. But their struggle to agree upon tax legislation shows that Republicans in Washington are challenged by the clashing interests of their traditional wealthy constituents and their new working-class base. For decades, the Democratic Party, once the party of labour and farmers, has been losing white working-class and white rural voters to the Republicans. In the last decade and a half, working-class whites have been joined by growing numbers of Hispanic and black voters in the exodus to the GOP. Meanwhile, college-educated professionals and high-income voters – once the core of the Republican coalition – have migrated in the opposite direction to the Democratic Party. The results of this realignment were dramatically evident in the election of 2024. Kamala Harris won voters from households earning more than $100,000 a year – roughly the top third of the population – along with low-income voters making less than $30,000 a year. At the same time, Trump enjoyed a 20 percentage point improvement in support among voters from households earning between $50,000 and $100,000 a year. This long-term class realignment of the parties has caused a crisis for the winners, the Republicans, as well as the losers, the Democrats. Affluent, college-educated “country club” Republicans, no longer dominant, are forced to share the party with working-class, less-educated “country music” Republicans. The tensions between the country club and country music wings of the party have erupted in debates over the tax bill that Congressional leaders and President Trump seek to pass by Memorial Day, May 26. State and Local Tax deduction One source of tension involves the State and Local Tax (Salt) deduction in the federal tax code, which allows taxpayers to deduct state and local taxes like property taxes and sales taxes from their federal income tax liability. The Salt deduction has indirectly subsidised the richest households who reside in places with the highest state and local taxes, like the New York and San Francisco metropolitan areas. The Joint Committee on Taxation in 2014 found that only 1 per cent of households earning less than $50,000 benefited from the Salt deduction, while 88 per cent of the benefit went to households with income above $100,000. And for decades there was no cap to the deduction that the rich could claim. This changed in 2017, when the Republican Congress in the first Trump administration capped the Salt deduction at $10,000 per household in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017. That Republicans, not Democrats, imposed the cap was shocking proof of how much the party had changed since the Reagan era. Members of the country music wing of the party asked: why should taxpayers in lower-income, less-educated states like Missouri and Montana subsidise millionaires and billionaires in high-tax, big-government coastal states like New York and California? The fate of the Salt cap in the Republican tax bill has provoked furious controversy. The dwindling number of Republicans from Northeastern and West Coast “silk stocking” districts have insisted that the cap must be raised to benefit their constituents. One of the most vocal is Representative Nick LaLota. He represents Suffolk County, New York, the fourth wealthiest county in New York State. Nationwide, however, few benefit from the Salt deduction – only 9.5 per cent of taxpayers claimed it in 2022. Medicaid Another flashpoint of conflict between the country club and country music factions of the Republican Party involves Medicaid, the joint federal-state programme of health insurance for low-income Americans. Back in the Reagan era, calls to cut spending on Medicaid and other social insurance and welfare programmes, whose recipients mostly voted for Democrats, were uncontroversial in a Republican party dominated by upscale voters angry at their tax bills. But many of the Republican Party’s new working-class and rural voters depend on Medicaid and other programmes like food stamps. This explains why some populist Republicans like Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri oppose cuts in Medicaid. In addition, some Republicans fear that Democrats will claim that they cut spending on working-class and poor Americans to reduce taxes on the rich. To immunise themselves from Democratic attack ads, Republicans in Congress have included measures that benefit ordinary Americans and retirees in the bill, including an increase in the standard deduction for all taxpayers, an increase in the child tax credit to $2,500 until 2028, when it would revert to $2,000, a new $4,000 deduction for Americans over 65 (instead of the elimination of taxation on Social Security that Trump favoured), and the elimination of taxes on tips, one of Trump’s campaign promises, but only until 2028. Having criticised President Biden’s policies of forgiving student loan debts of some college graduates as elitist, Congressional Republicans would allow car owners of all classes to deduct up to $10,000 in interest on car loans. Slowly but surely, then, the Republican Party is responding to its newly-important working-class voters by letting them share – if only a little – in the tax-cut largesse given to its traditional affluent supporters.

So disrespectful!

Got anything along the lines of "And Indian and a Pakistani walk into a bar"?

Oh funny! Millions and millions of people going to die and your posting jokes! How do you sleep at night? Funny joke, though! 🤣

Right, the small business owners will just be out of business.

Oh, were they unvaccinated?

You don't care that he is causing a needless recession? So he can just do anything and you would be ok with it Orange man is God!

Priest become priest for the money? You say some pretty dumb things

Interesting article on the supply chains and how it will be small businesses that pay the biggest price. https://www.wsj.com/business/tariffs-china-ryan-petersen-small-business-35f99669 Petersen is explaining to anyone who will listen why hefty U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports could be catastrophic for America’s small businesses. “If they don’t change the tariffs, it’s going to be an extinction-level, asteroid-wiping-out-the-dinosaurs kind of event,” he told me. “Only these aren’t dinosaurs. These are dynamic, healthy businesses.” He knows this because those businesses are his customers. They use Flexport to transport products from the factory to your front door. Petersen’s company handles everything from booking space on planes, trucks and enormous ocean carriers to managing all the tedious paperwork along the way. It’s a sleek tech platform that gives Petersen a window into the entire global economy, providing a real-time look at the situation on the ground and on the water. He can track exactly how much it costs to ship any item anywhere—and how much more it costs because of tariffs. His company has visibility into about 1% of U.S. trade, he said, which is more than enough data for him to connect dots. “We have a pretty good view of what’s happening,” he says. And what’s happening isn’t pretty.

By far, Biden's biggest mistake was not stepping down earlier so the Democrats could have a real selection process. Instead we got someone who was picked. The successor and had not earned it, and probably couldn't if she tried That kind of goes to the people that hid him away from the lights and then hoped he would somehow do ok in the spotlight.

Clown show