Tea Party Apocalypse
The Democratic shortfall in Wisconsin bodes a change in US democracy. If the next presidential election ushers in the Tea Party, here’s your world:
✔ Doing your income tax is easy, one sheet of paper, a flat tax, as proposed by Steve Forbes, everyone paying 17% with no deductions. Corporations, however, free to
define “taxable income,” outflank the no-deductions rule and pay no taxes at all.
✔ Government revenues plunge. Medicare, medicaid, social security, unemployment insurance, education, and repairs to roads and bridges drastically cut.
✔ Interstates, sold to private corporations, become toll roads.
✔ Sixty-one percent of construction workers are laid off.
✔ Except for churches, not-for-profit status is revoked and charitable organizations must pay taxes, the sole tax increase of any kind. Charitible giving, no longer tax deductible, dries up. Not-for-profits fold, including youth and senior centers.
✔ Hospitals are sold to profit-making corporations. Emergency rooms demand up front payment. Every morning squads remove corpses of those who died after being denied treatment. Unclaimed bodies are cremated and buried in unmarked graves.
✔ City and state colleges double tuition and cut scholarships. The gap is filled by for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix and Career Education Corporation, plus a host of online diploma mills offering framed degrees but no classes.
✔ Military bases abroad are closed, troops brought home and redeployed on borders and for quelling street riots by the jobless in all major cities, put down by soldiers using tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannon
✔ Banks, no longer forbidden to foreclose without good documentation, re-open forgery mills, produce counterfeit documents, accepted by judges, with millions forced out of homes, which fall into disrepair and are occupied by squatters.
✔ Middle class neighborhoods become crime-ridden slums. Shack and tent cities pop up in abandoned shopping malls. Lacking sanitary facilities, they become centers of disease, pointed to as examples of the genetic inferiority of people too lazy to work.
✔ Crime soars. New prisons are built and run by profit-making companies. All new prisons are segregated by race and religion.
✔ National parks are sold to corporations which lease the land for drilling and mining. They open hunting lodges and build super highways with “trading posts” that sell Native American crafts imported from China.
✔ Michael Steele’s, “Drill, baby drill,” becomes a Tea Party mantra, shrieked by Sarah Palin, and soon new oil rigs and gas fracking operations are seen in every state.
✔ Lumbering clear-cuts all remaining forests in the Pacific northwest.
✔ Uncontrolled fishing in the Grand Banks wipes out remaining stocks of cod, haddock and swordfish.
✔ The border fence between Mexico and the U.S. is extended—Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific—and rebuilt using the USSR’s Berlin design, two walls, no-man’s land between, anyone in it shot.
✔ Immigration from Canada goes down, but taking no chances, a wall is built along that border too. Trade with both countries plummets, except for oil. Immigration plunges but emigration skyrockets. The four most popular destinations are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway. For the first time in history, the U.S. population shrinks.
✔ The Romney/Paul administration responds by outlawing all forms of birth control. Abortion for any reason becomes a capital crime.
Welcome to the Third World.
The Democratic shortfall in Wisconsin bodes a change in US democracy. If the next presidential election ushers in the Tea Party, here’s your world:
✔ Doing your income tax is easy, one sheet of paper, a flat tax, as proposed by Steve Forbes, everyone paying 17% with no deductions. Corporations, however, free to
define “taxable income,” outflank the no-deductions rule and pay no taxes at all.
✔ Government revenues plunge. Medicare, medicaid, social security, unemployment insurance, education, and repairs to roads and bridges drastically cut.
✔ Interstates, sold to private corporations, become toll roads.
✔ Sixty-one percent of construction workers are laid off.
✔ Except for churches, not-for-profit status is revoked and charitable organizations must pay taxes, the sole tax increase of any kind. Charitible giving, no longer tax deductible, dries up. Not-for-profits fold, including youth and senior centers.
✔ Hospitals are sold to profit-making corporations. Emergency rooms demand up front payment. Every morning squads remove corpses of those who died after being denied treatment. Unclaimed bodies are cremated and buried in unmarked graves.
✔ City and state colleges double tuition and cut scholarships. The gap is filled by for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix and Career Education Corporation, plus a host of online diploma mills offering framed degrees but no classes.
✔ Military bases abroad are closed, troops brought home and redeployed on borders and for quelling street riots by the jobless in all major cities, put down by soldiers using tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannon
✔ Banks, no longer forbidden to foreclose without good documentation, re-open forgery mills, produce counterfeit documents, accepted by judges, with millions forced out of homes, which fall into disrepair and are occupied by squatters.
✔ Middle class neighborhoods become crime-ridden slums. Shack and tent cities pop up in abandoned shopping malls. Lacking sanitary facilities, they become centers of disease, pointed to as examples of the genetic inferiority of people too lazy to work.
✔ Crime soars. New prisons are built and run by profit-making companies. All new prisons are segregated by race and religion.
✔ National parks are sold to corporations which lease the land for drilling and mining. They open hunting lodges and build super highways with “trading posts” that sell Native American crafts imported from China.
✔ Michael Steele’s, “Drill, baby drill,” becomes a Tea Party mantra, shrieked by Sarah Palin, and soon new oil rigs and gas fracking operations are seen in every state.
✔ Lumbering clear-cuts all remaining forests in the Pacific northwest.
✔ Uncontrolled fishing in the Grand Banks wipes out remaining stocks of cod, haddock and swordfish.
✔ The border fence between Mexico and the U.S. is extended—Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific—and rebuilt using the USSR’s Berlin design, two walls, no-man’s land between, anyone in it shot.
✔ Immigration from Canada goes down, but taking no chances, a wall is built along that border too. Trade with both countries plummets, except for oil. Immigration plunges but emigration skyrockets. The four most popular destinations are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway. For the first time in history, the U.S. population shrinks.
✔ The Romney/Paul administration responds by outlawing all forms of birth control. Abortion for any reason becomes a capital crime.
Welcome to the Third World.
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