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.

Q Toon: So Help Us God

I, Donald Berzilius Trump, don't need to solemnly swear anything, believe me. My presidency will be the most goodly, amazing, amazing presidency you have ever seen, I'm telling you. I have terrific ideas for upholding the Constitution, especially the part about my secret plan to replace Obamacare, which was a terrible disaster, everybody says so. But I can promise that I will, to the best of my ability, which is the best ability, I can assure you, preserve, protect and defend the most exclusive private school system you have ever seen and I'm gonna make the public school system pay for it. You're gonna be so tired of me bringing back jobs from those lying rapists in Mexico that you won't mind losing Medicare and Social Security, or clean air and water, or a free press, or whatever it is that I put Ben Carson in charge of.

Q Toon: Atlas Shkrugged

I'm posting this week's cartoon a little earlier than usual because of a full schedule at home on Christmas Eve. And again, it's not a Christmasy topic, although I'm kicking myself that I already used both A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life as the basis for a cartoon just a few weeks ago:

Martin Shkreli came to national attention as the 32-year-old Shkrooge who bought the patent on Daraprim, a drug needed by HIV/AIDS patients, and promptly raised the price of the medication by 5,000% -- from $13 per pill to $750. For each individual pill. His response to the instant and near-universal condemnation of his inhumane money-grubbing was to wish that he had raised the price even higher.

Last week, Shkreli was arrested for securities fraud:

“Shkreli essentially ran his companies like a Ponzi scheme, where he used each subsequent company to pay off the defrauded investors in the prior company,” U.S. Attorney Robert Capers told the press in a statement after Shkreli’s arrest.

Prosecutors deny Shkreli's whine that the charges are related to his Daraprim price gouging. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if the price gouging were not directly related to his need to pay off some of those previously defrauded investors.

Martin Shkreli embodies everything that is wrong with our present economic system, which places little or no value on actually producing things of  any actual useful purpose day to day. Oh, sure, you can become a billionaire by inventing the next flashy new app consumers can use to shout "Look at me!" on the internet.

But why bother with any of that when the real money is in hiding other people's money under a shell and moving it around a lot?