A Suspicion

I think I know part of why Republicans are always for tax cuts. Aside from ideology, voodoo supply-side economics, or sincerely believing taxes are too high. It's political reasoning. Not just in the sense of "People don't like taxes, if we say we'll give them money, they'll vote for us." It's a longer term strategy than that, and one of the only reasons I can think of that explains why they keep cutting taxes when we're already so deep into a deficit.

See, the thing it does is it reduces the possibilities for the next President and Congress. Especially so if they're Democrats or *gasp* actual liberals. There are a lot of things liberals would like to see the government do. (No, Liberals are not "for government spending" as some weird abstract thing, liberals are for government spending that WORKS, and does certain things. Which happen to cost money. Tangent over.) But when the government is trillions of dollars in debt, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars it doesn't have, if you're sane, the first thing it has to do, before spending any more money, is pay off what it already owes. Nobody's going to be able to really suggest, say, sane national health care with a huge deficit. There's plenty of arguments that could be made for it, even with a deficit, but it leaves the Republicans a giant target to shoot at. (Okay, besides going "LOOK! COMMIES! NATIONAL HEALTH CARE IS COMMUNIST! SCARE SCARE!) The fact that the deficit is the Republican's fault will do absolutely nothing to prevent them from screaming about "Fiscal sanity" and other such buzzwords.

And on top of that, to fix all the problems left behind, taxes are going to have to go up. Even if it's just the most stupid and inefficients parts of the Bush Tax Cuts for His Rich Buddies that get undone, do you really think they'll pass up the chance to scream about "EVIL TAX AND SPEND LIBERALS!" Yeah, me neither.

Basically, the plan is to screw things up enough that when you lose and the opposition takes power, they have to put all their effort into fixing the disasters you left them, so they can't get anything they wanted to done. Then you blast them for the things they had to do to fix your screw-ups, and blast them for not getting the things they wanted to do done. And get elected long enough to reward your cronies and leave a nice big steaming pile of disasters waiting for the next time you get tossed out and the opposition gets in.

Or maybe I'm paranoid. But I don't think so.

Class, not Race

In my Arabic class, most everybody is your general Generic American College Student. A bunch of the other people are first or second generation kids of immigrants, but they were either born or grew up here in the US. So they're not very different from me.

But that makes sense. It's a self-selected group, sort of. I mean, they've got enough money to go to community college at least, and they don't already speak Arabic, so it's not like it's a class recent immigrants are going to take. So it's going to mostly be a fairly similar group of people, speaking on socio-economic levels. Which just adds more evidence to my thoughts that in a lot of ways, class matters more than race in the US these days, though the two are often intertwined.