Perhaps she’s just our Queen Nancy Pelosi-Antoinette after the infamously out-of-touch and ultimately beheaded Queen of France, who when asked for bread by starving peasants infamously told her underlings to “Let them eat cake!”
Former Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi was caught on camera calling $1,000 “crumbs” for the American middle class. Of course, these aren’t just a thousand dollar found lying around on the street or won on a $1 scratcher at the gas station. Whether genuinely goodhearted or good public relations-minded, employers at companies such as Home Depot, Wal-Mart and even Starbucks are voluntarily “trickling down” at least some of their reform windfall to benefit their employees to the tune of $1,000 or more.
These “pathetic crumbs” she first criticized from her pulpit on Capitol Hill before doubling down at this townhall are the ones Americans are receiving in the form of “bonuses” or pay raises due at least in part to the Trump administration’s successful tax reform efforts. The counterargument has been that along with the bonuses or other “insignificant” post-reform perks are employee layoffs at least in some cases. Though these have not been directly tied to the tax reform measures per se.
It all seems political for Pelosi in her hyperpartisan bubble. Flashback to 2011, and she called legislation extending a $40 payroll tax cut a “victory for all Americans” and attributed the accomplishment to “Obama’s leadership.” To be clear, the $40 was an average per biweekly check amounting to $1,040 calculated on that basis across that course of a year. So, regardless of ends and means and national debt, the fighting rhetoric is over $40…Or what amounts to many of us, lacking in the luxury of commuting in private jets paid for by someone else, as a tank of gas to get to and from our jobs to help earn Nancy Pelosi and our other lawmakers’ salaries.
If one really wants to play with the political accounting (with the disclaimer that the author is by no means an accountant or an expert in tax or other fiscal policy), then wouldn’t the Obama “victory for all Americans” $1040 + the Trump tax reform “crumbs” = $2,040 amount to an even greater victory for the American worker fortunate enough to take home more of his or her earnings home in lieu of having them thrown into the cesspool of congressional overspending?
Then again, to Nancy Pelosi with her six figure salary on Capitol Hill and taxpayer-subsidized health insurance as well as California vineyard, maybe $1,000 is something to make light of given her lifestyle and $40 is something to be alternately extravagantly praised and dismissed when convenient. Maybe Nancy just has zero real world sense of value when it comes to money, let alone a middle class one.
It’s understandable to an extent when $1,000 amounts to no more than a new designer pantsuit rather than bills being paid, groceries bought or a now affordable fun family trip making priceless memories. Perhaps she’s just our Queen Nancy Pelosi-Antoinette after the infamously out-of-touch and ultimately beheaded Queen of France, who when asked for bread by starving peasants infamously told her underlings to “Let them eat cake!”
We can only hope it works out better for Nancy come her next election bid later this year; her district is at least seemingly equally as out of touch so she stands a chance with or without DACA pressure mounting. Maybe it’s just the continuation of the Trump-bashing agenda under which priority #1 is that there can be no good news ever, and it will work nicely with her calculated campaign narrative to win over like-minded folks. In the meantime, $1,000 in “crumbs” is still more than $40 in “cake” and the American people still need to eat, whether it’s courtesy of a one-time bonus or a bi-weekly payout.
