This headline, tho:
Reuters: Trump's tax-exempt diesel draws skepticism from farmers, eludes others
Click for details if you like, but I'm not actually here to discuss those.(FN1) I'm thinking about all plans that fall under the heading "exempt diesel fuel from taxes for a short period to deal with current economic pressures."
Specifically, I'm thinking: This is what we get when we are only allowed to think in terms of our current political and economic system. This is what we get when any hint of "thinking outside the box" gets slapped down as socialism/communism/anti-business/un-American, generally.
Our current economic squeeze is the result of a lot of little decisions compounding over the years, plus a few big recent decisions. It is both chronic and acute. Incremental changes won't fix either a chronic disease or an acute catastrophic injury. We are slapping a Band-Aid on an MS patient who just got hit by a truck. Because we live in a political and economic system that not only refuses to consider more intensive interventions but vilifies them.
At this point I really don't care whether anyone "likes" Republicans more than Democrats or vice versa or none of the above. I care that we stop pretending that doing what we've always done will somehow get us different results.
Every candidate who discusses our current economy as if they don't understand that the US dollar is a fiat sovereign currency, or that it remains the world's reserve currency - in short, everyone who talks about our economy like federal spending can be compared to household budgeting - gains my instant suspicion. At best, they are too ignorant and unprepared to be making federal-level decisions. At worst, they know they're discussing the situation inaccurately and are doing it on purpose so they can continue to benefit from the current system...at least until it crashes down on everyone's heads.
As I said to Gremlin the other day, "the planet is not going to tolerate much more from our species." Yet we keep pretending that our inchworm pace can somehow outrun what has already overtaken us.
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FN1 though really, there are better ways to do this than the one the Trump administration chose, as the farmers interviewed in the article explain
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