Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the only Republican to vote against the Senate's version of the GOP tax bill, announced Friday that he has changed his mind and will vote yes....The only way to stop these people is to defeat every Republican who can possibly be defeated in Washington and in state governments. They all have to go. No Democrat is too far to the right to be worse than a Republican.
With Corker's support, the tax reform bill has crossed what many viewed as a final hurdle, virtually assuring that the legislation will eventually become law.
Corker's announcement came less than an hour after Sen. Marco Rubio said he would support the bill as well, after the GOP made changes to win his vote....
On Thursday, Rubio said, "I won't support the bill" unless GOP leaders expand the child tax credit....
And yet struggling white Americans will still vote Republican for years and years to come. Chris Hayes tweets:
One way in which extreme inequality is self-reinforcing is that very wealthy people are fairly segregated from middle-class society so most Americans don't get to see up close just how much obscene money is sloshing around at the top.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 15, 2017
Right -- they don't see the rich. It's not that they live in the poor part of town and the rich live in a mansion on the hill. The rich live elsewhere. The white working class doesn't understand how much they have (which might make the fact that they're still not satisfied seem obscene). The rich are people struggling white Americans see on TV, not in real life. Their level of affluence is just not real to struggling white Americans.
But struggling white Americans see cultural elites all the time, because some live nearby and others are regularly put on display in Two Minutes' Hates on Fox News. Some of the cultural elites are rich, but others are just ordinary people who managed to find their way to white-collar work with pretty good pay (or, sometimes, not-so-good pay). The right-wing media makes cultural elites the enemy. Elite elites are never portrayed as what they are: people who want it all even after they have enough to satisfy every one of their own desires and the desires of their descendants down through multiple generations. Their greed is invisible to the white working class, but some college professor just said something dumb, so they attack that guy as an elitist.
I don't know why the non-white working class sees through this. All I know is that the white working class apparently never will.
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And if you think Rubio, at least, made the bill a little bit better for poor and middle-class famiulies, well...
I wanted to see how much a favor Rubio did low income families with his act today.
— Andy Slavitt (@ASlavitt) December 15, 2017
For a family w 2 kids, the average cost of daycare is $2k/month.@marcorubio just secured $25/month for that family.
This same bill allows wealthy kids to inherit $11 million tax free.
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