The Sensible Reason the #GOPtaxscam Says Life Starts at Conception
What is this definition of when life begins doing in a “tax bill”?
(Just so we’re clear: two-thirds of fertilized eggs never make it to ten weeks’ gestation.)
To make sense of the inclusion of this non-scientific and seemingly random language in a tax bill, you need to understand the fundamental nature of the bill — which is difficult, since, at this writing, basically no one has had time read the whole thing in its final form. But here are the general principles of the thing:
“The richer the family, the more they benefit from the legislation, particularly over time.”
“The wealthiest Americans would be the biggest winners”
Eliminates the ACA individual mandate. “The Congressional Budget Office, the official nonpartisan estimator, has predicted that this change would cause health insurance premiums to rise by about 10 percent a year”
Oh, and it would increase the federal deficit by $3 trillion in a decade.
You get the idea. It’s a tax cut for the super-rich and big corporations. It will help the super-rich get super-richer, at the expense of anyone who isn’t rich, for decades to come.
Now, what does a tax cut for the wealthy have to do with the definition of when life begins?
Oligarchy.
For those new to the word, here’s Merriam-Webster’s definition:
It is the nature of an oligarchy that the very few, super-rich people and groups control the entire population. Their purpose in executing that control is not to ensure the wellbeing of the entire population, but to further enrich themselves, regardless of the cost to the population.
Think of a nation as, say, a tenant farm. You’ve got the landlord, who owns the land and takes payment in rent and a portion of everything the farm produces, without doing any of the work. You’ve got the tenant farmers, who scrape together a livelihood by working the farm — fields of crops, pastures and barns of livestock… in short, life, both plant and animal, deliberately cultivated and culled to generate the resources necessary to keep the farmers’ bodies and souls together, while leaving enough left over to meet the landlord’s demands.
We non-millionaires are not the farmers in this metaphor. We are the livestock. The landlords and farmers depend upon our bodies for their wealth; without our labor, meat, skins, milk, etc, they would have no capital. Also: without our offspring, they would have no capital.
What farmer would want their livestock in control of reproduction? If your cow chooses to be on birth control, not only do you lose her calf, you lose all that milk. If your pig gets an abortion, that’s maybe half a dozen pigs that you can’t sell or fatten to slaughter. That’s a fortune for you, stolen by the cow and the pig who thought they should have the right to decide when or if they reproduce.
The bill makes perfect sense.
