Thanks to Randall Burg (letter, Dec. 1) for his wonderfully articulate and clear exposition of the consequences that will follow the Republican tax cut. That cut has now passed in the Senate and the results are these: the deficit will increase stratospherically; this will so impoverish the country that our crumbling infrastructure will be irreparable; the rich will be wallowing in money while our last remaining shreds of governmental decency -- namely our social safety nets (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) -- will be eroded if not entirely abrogated; income inequality will increase to the point where we become a third world nation; the poor and middle class will suffer the most; and our children -- deprived of the supports which every decent country supplies for its aging citizens -- will be forced to work until they die.
In the meantime, for the sake of this unconscionable economic rape of the country, the Republicans have been willing to support a depraved president who sows antagonism between people by exacerbating religious and racial divisions with lies (the latest triggering from both the Netherlands and Great Britain cries of outrage and contempt for Trump's impolitic and dangerous bigotry, and dismay from indigenous peoples for the racial slurs he managed to insinuate into a ceremony ostensibly honoring Native Americans who risked their lives during World War II.)
Republicans have been willing to countenance this and much more (the support, for example, of a credibly accused child molester in Alabama from a president who is a self-confessed sexual predator). And all of this for one reason: greed on a virtually unprecedented scale.
To those who support Trump and the Republicans, I ask: how can this be? How can you look at yourselves in the mirror, as the country descends into shamelessness and ignominy that seems almost irrevocable, without protesting what you have become? As the Mueller investigations will doubtless reveal, Shakespeare's searing indictment of political corruption has no better example than Trump and the mercenary lackeys who support him: "Plate sin with gold and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; a dog's obeyed in office."
Stephen Gurney
ADVERTISEMENT
Bemidji
