Shakes here...
At a certain point, I don't particularly care if these blowhards are deliberately misrepresenting policies to obfuscate their appalling realities or if they're just being alarmingly obtuse. The intentions cease to have any relevance when you say something this fucking dumb:
"[W]e are turning our back on the middle-class and poor people in this country who depend on the minimum wage and death-tax relief." — Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas
The proposed "death tax" (or, as it is known by anyone who favors integrity over hyperbole, "estate tax") relief to which Hutchison is referring would exempt $5 million of an individual estate from taxation.
Now I grant you that I'm not the most well-connected girl in the world, but, in all my many years, I've yet to meet a middle-class or poor person who has $5 million lying around. In fact—and again, I admit I’m no genius—I’m pretty sure not having anything close to $5 million, on which deriving benefit from the estate tax proposal the GOP attached to the minimum wage bill is predicated, is sort of what makes someone middle-class or poor.
But maybe I'm just being too literal. Maybe what old Hutchy meant is that middle-class and poor people are dependent on the estate tax relief given to the wealthy, because that just means there will be more to trickle down on them. Though, still, I wonder if minimum wage workers would have time to collect all those pennies from heaven, what with the wanton spending sprees and luxury vacations they'd be taking with that extra two bucks an hour burning a hole in their pockets.
(Hat tip Jill.)
