As I transition away from the School Board I’m finding that national affairs is taking over the job of waking me from sound sleep in the middle of the night.
I woke from a dream about a perilous journey being carried across the skies in a jerryrigged balloon and began stewing about one aspect of the Republican tax bill – its attack on state and local tax deductions.
The attack is really on blue states with their more generous treatment of the poor. The high taxes required to pay for better schools, Medicaid and environmental care can currently be deducted from Federal taxes. The Republicans, who have been taken over by the ethos of the Dixiecrats, want to put all the states on the same low tax footing of Mississippi and Alabama.
Democrats are counting on such a change causing an electoral rebellion when it comes to pass. I hope they are right but the Republicans are bending over backward to postpone the pain until after the 2018 elections. They are counting on our strengthening economy to lesson the pain even as they grovel at feet of Trump’s base by throwing their belated support behind a likely child molester in the Alabama Senate race.
The real test will be 2020 the year of the next Census and subsequent reapportionment of Congressional Districts. Republicans owned that process in 2010 and their many Republican controlled state governments went on to tear to design voting laws that hearkened back to the good old days of southern white supremacy when it was a rare black person who was permitted to exercise his or her right to vote without being lynched.
If the Republicans get their way child molesters will be able to hide behind the Ten Commandments. That’s a small price to pay for limited government.
