Oh, it's crude. And it's not possible, not to mention illegal. But it's absolutely an example of how the man works: the President of the United States has promised to pay each and every American* a middling-large sum of money if his party retains control of Congress.
It's the same appeal as a one-armed bandit, only with far less chance of a payoff: pull lever, get money. And there's a group of voters, ranging from low-information to so deep in the fantasy they'll take it on faith, who will be moved by it. Is the size of that group decisively large? Is greed a stronger motivation than high prices for everything and stagnant wages? Stronger than the reaction to an increasingly authoritarian Federal government whose masked secret-police thugs act with impunity?
I don't know.
The truth is, the money's not his to spend; it's Congress's. And Congress doesn't have it; the payout would run to more than 1.3 trillion dollars and they're already deeply in the red funding his don't-call-it-a-war with Iran, the same one that's driving up the price of oil, fuel, and everything that relies on oil-derived stuff to be made or grown and transported. I suppose they could just have the Mint print it -- that's what the Left calls "Modern Monetary Theory" and the Right mocks (so does the center); it's inherently inflationary, meaning by the time you get your money, it'll buy fast-food dinner for two and a daily newspaper as long as it's not the Sunday edition. And it's illegal in the U.S. to pay people for votes, not that illegality is much of a deterrent. (And it's the actual paying for votes part that is illegal -- candidates and everyone else can talk about it all they like.)
It's money no American will ever receive, no matter who they vote for.
Politicians have been selling pie in the sky for years; Mencken called elections a kind of advance auction of stolen goods, but the modern, jet-propelled GOP version auctions off the stolen goods -- and then keeps them.
I beg people to choose a better class of crook. I have no faith left that they will.
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* Citizens, presumably, given his party's positions, not resident non-citizens.
It's sadly interesting to watch the moral decline of the erstwhile Moral Majority party, as they go far further in selling out their values than they were accusing the Left of doing a mere two years ago.
ReplyDeleteAs Coffeezilla notes- "crime is legal'.
I'm curious to see how the MAGA Media Organs are going to spin the Hunter crapcoin rugpull as bad while pretending that the Trump crapcoin rugpulls aren't.