Washington D.C.—

On Twitter, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan recently mistook $1.50 for a meaningful weekly wage increase following the giant tax cuts for the rich that Republicans passed into law. He tweeted:

“A secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, PA, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week … she said [that] will more than cover her Costco membership for the year.” -@PRyan

But Mr. Ryan has told close associates he does not appreciate the rest of America’s lack of gratitude.

“Paul is furious,” explained Majority Whip Steve Scalise. “By cutting taxes dramatically for the super rich, he’s practically putting food on the table of every working class family those rich people employ. The slight wage increase following the tax cuts means that once a week middle-class American children can split one McDouble from McDonalds. Or, if the family saves their money for two weeks, the children can split a 4-pc Chicken McNuggets and the family will still have about 80 cents left over to spend however they want. Economics is really hard, but Paul Ryan is a math wiz when it comes to this stuff. He managed to figure out how to save the average working class American family $1.50 every single week, and only by adding a mere $1.5 trillion to the deficit.”

Other GOP officials agreed that Speaker Ryan deserves more respect.

“Paul is seriously on a mission to help the American people,” explained Ryan’s friend and GOP Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “He just wants American families to succeed financially. But he also understands that we have to help in a way that is good for business. The fact of the matter is that embracing the importance of labor as an act of economic humanism is just fundamentally bad for business. The responsible way to promote American families is to shower riches on the very rich so that, inevitably, their hands are too full of proverbial gold coins to notice when a few slip through their fingers and are obtainable by the underclasses. It’s the only safe way to distribute income without promoting socialism. Paul is really deftly threading the needle here in making sure the working poor in this country get extra cents every day, but doing it in a way that the superrich aren’t inconvenienced in any way, and don’t even notice that any scraps on the floor are being selfishly hoarded by the undeserving poor. Some Americans simply don’t appreciate how those cents every day add up. Before American families realize it, at the end of the week they have a whole dollar and half extra that they wouldn’t have had if it weren’t for Paul Ryan. So Paul’s a little upset that he’s not getting the recognition we all believe he deserves.”

Democrats, however, seized on Mr. Ryan’s tone-deaf messaging.

“Democrats are trying to give Americans a $1.50 boost in wages every single hour,” said Representative Dave Hoser of Missouri. “The American people should see through this sham of a gift to workers. If you’re working 40 hours a week, getting an extra $1.50 at the end of the week means you’re getting a wage increase of less than 4 cents per hour. Which party is trying to see the minimum wage go up to $10, $12, and even $15 per hour? The Democratic Party. Republicans have no respect whatsoever for labor, or struggling Americans. Paul Ryan’s assertion that we should be thankful for pennies is offensive to the people who are the back bone of the American economy. Income inequality has become the elephant in the economy. It is outrageous that full time employees flounder in poverty or struggle with paycheck-to-paycheck living. America is not that kind of country. The superrich have two options. They either need to accept a higher tax increase so that the government can better adequately assist struggling Americans with a robust social contract and safety net, or the superrich need to start spending their profits on their workers. It’s either-or, not neither, because America has not been behaving financially like the greatest country to ever exist since the 80s. Republican policies have carved out middle America from the economy by sabotaging the public government’s commitment to its people, and by deliberately compromising the nation’s fiscal health. Since Reagan we have seen a pattern of Republican governments deliberately and maliciously starving the beast of government with moronic tax cuts designed only for their increasingly superrich campaign fund’s base, and then virtue-signaling about tightening our belts when a Democrat is elected. They put wars and tax cut hubris on a credit card, and then demanded Democrats pay it off with cuts to progressive social programs. Obama and Clinton still heroically managed to cut America’s deficits, and every Republican president sandwiching them has let the deficits run loose without a leash. Republicans do not deserve to govern, and they have proved it with a blend of incompetence when in the majority, and of hyper-partisan obstruction when in the minority. I cannot stress enough that every American needs to pay attention to the economic subterfuge that Republicans have conducted for decades and, most importantly, to vote in 2018. Republicans and their donor base profit obscenely from your apathy and disinterest.”

(Picture courtesy of Gage Skidmore.)

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