Ready for Their Tax Cut

Here's an extra cartoon for your Christmas stocking:

As I write, we're waiting to see whether Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) can persuade his party's deficit chicken hawks to increase the child credit in their tax bill to double the current amount. This as a sop to lower and middle class taxpayers so that the Republicans' so-called reforms don't come off as a complete give-away to corporations and the rich.

Republicans and their benefactors have long complained that tax rates for U.S. corporations and the richest Americans are the highest in the world — which they're not, but we have to let that pass for now. They gloss over the fact that the overwhelming majority of these upper-bracket filers end up paying little or no taxes thanks to a wealth of deductions that they have lobbied for over the years.

Slashing the upper income tax rates was supposed to be accompanied by erasing significant numbers of those tax loopholes, but by some miracle, the only exemptions and deductions being eliminated are the ones used by lower and middle class filers. Exemptions and deductions that benefit the top 1% — including many Republican members of Congress — remain or are increased.

For example, during the fall, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson — the 26th-richest member of Congress — withheld his support for the bill, leveraging his vote to pressure lawmakers to add provisions to the bill increasing tax breaks for investors in pass-through entities. The most recent federal records show Johnson has up to $30 million of ownership stakes in three LLCs that generate rental income. Johnson earned between $115,000 and $1,050,000 of income from those investments in 2016.

And if you still believe the theory that coddling the rich will enable the benefits to trickle down to everybody else once their wealth finally achieves some mythical critical mass, think again. They have plenty of other plans for their tax breaks, starting with mergers and acquisitions and ending with trimming the newly redundant employees from their mega-companies.

Well, at least Monopoly Man at the southeast corner of this cartoon is generating jobs for all the attendants at the sexual harassment clinic.

Targeting Tammy Baldwin

The Koch Brothers are already targeting Wisconsin's Democratic Senator, Tammy Baldwin, up for reelection in 2018.

The right-wingers are now airing television ads warning that liberal!!! (shudder!!) Sen. Baldwin refuses to support the Republicans' tax break for billionaires.

But 63 percent of Republican voters told the pollster that deficit reduction should take precedence over tax cuts for corporations — and 75 percent said that combating the debt should take priority over cuts that benefit the wealthy. That’s a big problem for Republicans: A recent CBS News poll found that 58 percent of Americans believe that the GOP tax plan favors the wealthy, despite Trump’s vigorous assurances that it does not.
Nevertheless, the Kochs are persisting: On Thursday, the billionaire brothers announced a $1.6 million ad buy in Wisconsin attacking Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin. The 30-second spots are ostensibly geared at pressuring Baldwin to break ranks with her caucus and back Trump’s tax cuts — but, in reality, they are early campaign advertisements for her eventual Republican challenger in 2018.

Drawing Board of Education

Your kids may be on spring break, but here at Bergetoons, it's Back-to-Schoolback Saturday.

I started my editorial cartoon career forty years ago by drawing about our education system — a topic of interest to me since I was still in school at the time. The 1970s in my hometown were marked by union strikes interrupting every other school year, starting with a custodians' union strike in 1970. Most of the strikes lasted a couple of weeks, but a teachers' strike my senior year lasted 50 days — starting in January and lasting all the way through February and into March.

With plenty of time on my hands, I took ballpoint pen to paper and drew the next two cartoons, my first editorial cartoons to be printed in an honest-to-goodness daily newspaper. (Caricatured on the left of this first one is union negotiator Jim Ennis, who had a conveniently round face; on the right is school board negotiator Thatcher Peterson, who didn't.)

To make up for lost school days once classes finally resumed, the district scheduled classes on Saturdays and extended the school year until June 30. We seniors were graduated weeks earlier, however, in order for schools to send our records to colleges and universities on time. It also gave us a slight edge getting summer jobs.

Racine's experience with teachers' strikes was hardly unique. Between 1969 and 1974, there were 50 teachers' strikes in Wisconsin, most notably the 1974 strike in Hortonville, during which the school district summarily fired 86 of its 88 teachers; townsfolk formed vigilante groups against the union members, and the union leader was hanged in effigy from the town water tower. Teachers unions from around the state sent members to support the Hortonville strikers, but to no avail. The Hortonville teachers appealed their firing all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which found in favor of the school district.

I've encountered quite a few people locally whose sour opinion of labor unions is directly a result of  those days. A  jaundiced view  of schools and a reluctance to fund them adequately, on the other hand, predates the union issue. Funding schools through local property taxes makes sense from the point of view of having community-wide support of a community service, but it does require convincing property owners who have no children in school of the value of other people's education.

My generation went through four years of "split shift" middle schools because the community hadn't built enough schools to accommodate the baby boom. Even after we were graduated out of the system, voters only very grudgingly voted to repair or replace older schools that were literally crumbling to pieces.

Sex education has always been a thorny issue for schools. How much information is too much? How much education is not enough?

Sex Ed has been one factor pushing some parents to take their kids out of the public schools; not wanting their kids taught science is another. It furthermore stands to reason that children do better in schools where the whole class is motivated and all parents are invested in the kids' education. Public schools must teach the talented and the indifferent alike, whether the parents have the time or inclination to get involved or not.

Along the way, private school parents have become convinced that it's not fair that they should still have to pay for public schools as well as their private tuition. Thus arose the idea that kids going to private schools should be entitled to public tax dollars, too; its proponents gave their voucher programs the name "School Choice."

The above cartoon fairly encapsulates one of the problems I have with subsidizing private schools. But when I was drawing for the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, their editorial stance was firmly in favor of school choice, and they occasionally wanted cartoons that reflected that viewpoint. It can be a good exercise every once in a while to try one's hand at drawing a cartoon with which one disagrees, although I wouldn't recommend making a career of it.

Along came Scott Walker and Republican control of all levers of state government after the 2010 elections. Recognizing them as the last institutional support of the Democratic party, teachers' and other public employee unions were the Republicans' first target. Koch brothers radio and TV ads stoking public resentment of public sector workers. For 30 years, private sector workers had seen their jobs sent overseas and their wages, at best, stagnant. The students of Hortonville and all the other stricken schools in the 1970s were now all grown up and ready to pay those teachers back.

With Republicans now in charge of all levers of the federal government, this will become a national issue yet again. I just posted this last cartoon only a month ago, but I think it's worth another look, since mercurial American President Donald Trump hasn't flip-flopped on subsidizing private education.

Yet.

Toon: Republican Health Care

The Koch Brothers have an anti-health care ad which shows a young woman arriving at her gynecologist's office and telling her doctor that she has enrolled in "Obamacare." When she gets on the examining table and puts her legs up in the stirrups, the doctor leaves, and a really, really creepy big-headed Uncle Sam brandishing a speculum rises up between her legs.

The Kochs' creepy Uncle Sam tells us three things.

1. that the Koch Brothers haven't been paying attention to what Republican-run states have been doing vis-à-vis women's reproductive rights, 
2. that the Koch Brothers therefore don't particularly care about women's reproductive rights, and
3. that the Koch Brothers really, really, hate America.

I mean, really. Where did they get that Uncle Sam head, anyway? Was it a souvenir from when they were protesting against the Great Satan in the streets of Teheran in the 1980s?

Job Creators Toon

You know those rich people President Obama is talking about taxing at rates unheard of since the boom of the 1990s? No, not those famous actors, heiresses and Wall Street speculators. We're talking about the hard-working industrialists who have spent the last couple of decades making their companies lean and mean by laying off as many employees as they possibly can.

They are job creators now.

Turns out that the only thing preventing them from creating more jobs is that they still have to pay taxes. (We certainly can't wait around for all those laid-off employees to stimulate the economy.) The Bush tax cuts haven't been around long enough to encourage our job creators to get around to any job creating, but never fear. The Republican party is dedicated to making sure that job creators' bank accounts stay fat and contended.

So our Republican governors and state legislators have been hard at work cutting workers' pay and benefits. Republicans in Congress have discovered the federal debt after eight years of ignoring it, and are willing to bankrupt the entire country to get the federal government shut down. They are willing to "broaden the tax base," which sounds better than "raising taxes on the poor, out of work, and elderly," and are eager to stop government spending on -- well, the poor, out of work, and elderly.

Whenever you see one of these Republican politicians, they repeat the same lines about protecting our job creators, cutting taxes, getting rid of government regulations (such as worker safety standards, consumer protections, anti-pollution laws and the like) and making it more and more difficult for anyone harmed by lax safety standards, defective products, pollution, or the like to sue them in court.

And through it all, you never see the Charles Koch's lips move.