How hatred of Government became hatred of taxes became the modern GOP

This screen capture from the intro to one of my favorite French detective shows Les petits meurtres d’Agath Christie fits with my last paragraph below.

But to begin here’s a book review about the Republican Party’s modern fetish for low taxes and untrammeled rich people.

The key to understanding the modern GOP? Its hatred of taxes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/02/14/power-destroy-antitax-history-graetz-review/

This is only a book review and I do not disagree with the argument in this book. I’d only say that hatred of taxes has been a cement that has held several constituencies of the modern GOP together.

The south always hated to pay for taxes to educate black kids who might use an education to prove they were the equals of white people. When Brown v Board of Education went into effect my parents were typical republicans who in 1956 made up their mind to move into a Topeka Neighborhood where integration was about to begin in earnest. In the South private religious schools were set up that were paid for by taxes paid for by both black and white citizens while public schools with lot of black children were short changed.

Apparently the Dad who raised his son to engage in ménage-a-trois while taking over Liberty University got jacked up about this so Jerry Falwell led his church members like Moses or the current Speaker of the House of Representatives into the Reagan Republican Party.

That particular motivation of Falwell’s was new to me. The story’s other tax phobes I already knew. I gladly flipped the bird when the Club for Growth’s Grover Norquist demanded every Republican running for office across America pledge to never to raise taxes. Grover bragged he wanted to shrink government so small that he could drown it in a bathtub.BTW that post of mine is from 2019 almost twenty years after I refused to sign the tax pledge but I know the history of the GOP. It was Lincoln who gave the nation its first national income tax. Teddy Roosevelt who taxed corporations and encouraged us to have a National Bank a subject my Grandfather argued for in Debate before the Federal Reserve was born in 1913. If Grover Norquist or Donny Trump had been president in 1939 the Earth would be under the control of Adolph Hitler’s heirs.

Alf Landon the Kansas governor who fought Franklin Roosevelt and his government plans to put the unemployed to work said long after his crushing defeat to Roosevelt in 1936 that FDR saved America. All this has been washed away by a narcissist who just said he’d give Russia free reign to invade our allies in Europe. And Trump let Global warming get out of hand as he left Iran free to build nuclear weapons and gave Israel’s Netanyahu so much freedom to persecute Palestinians and steel their lands that he prompted the Hamas Attacks which has ended up spilling so much blood it won’t be forgotten for two lifetimes. It was this Trump who derided George W Bush for his wars in the Middle East.

Trump rid the GOP of the last vestiges of Republicans with spines and called war hero John McCain a loser for getting captured while his Daddy got a doctor to claim he had a bum foot. This is the guy who envies Dictators with terror squads and whose followers read the fantasy book of revolution that prompted Timothy McVeigh to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma. His fans soak up WWF wrestling story lines as they label honest elections “stolen” call non Fox news organizations fake-news. And Fox got called fake to when they reported accurately that Arizonan’s vote for Joe Biden.

As my Republican Dad told me when I was a kid making sure the rich get all the money is what gives the world French Revolutions. Today’s Republicans are bleeding America to give no accounts like Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, billions of dollars by cozying up to MBS who cuts his critics up and stuffs them into suitcases.

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