by Josh Moon, The Alabama Reporter
Did you know that “socialism” is making public transportation cheaper, health care affordable and school lunches free?
I mean, it’s not, but it is. You know?
Just listen to pretty much any right-wing politician. All of that stuff is “socialism” now. And you can’t have it around or your country will wither up and die. Like Venezuela. Or Cuba.
You can’t just take tax dollars from citizens and use that money to make things easier or less awful for the general population. Are you people nuts? That’s probably how Hitler started. The Nazis did have the word “socialist” right there in their name—National Socialist Party. I rest my case.
And that’s why all of these Republicans are sounding the alarm on the ever-creeping socialism that’s worming its way into American lives, even here in Alabama. It’s definitely not because they have no idea how to help the struggling working class and poor and have instead started doing the only thing they’re even semi-competent at—criticizing the ideas of others.
No, they’re worried about you.
They see you being sucked in by these flashy promises—some of them coming from (gasp!) Muslims that y’all are electing—of free or reduced-price things, and they don’t want to see you go down a pathway of being able to afford the basic necessities of life and feed your children because they know how much you’ll regret not having that soul-crushing anxiety with every trip to the mailbox or grocery store.
But look, it can be hard to know what is and isn’t socialism. Those tricky liberals, with their rational thought and common-sense approaches, make it so hard sometimes to know what’s right and wrong.
Don’t worry, though. In the interest of the common good and ensuring that we don’t turn into a socialist wasteland, where every kid gets a free school lunch and a fairly common disease doesn’t bankrupt us, I have put together a list of what is and isn’t socialism—according to Republicans, of course.
First off, sorry, Mamdani, but city-run grocery stores that lower food prices for the working-class folks in the nearby neighborhoods are definitely Castro-level socialism. It’s evil and must be stomped out.
State-run liquor stores, on the other hand … well, that’s just good business. So what if the state laws of Alabama require every bar and restaurant to purchase only from the state and forbid grocery stores and others from selling liquor, ensuring that consumers pay higher prices? That’s the (not at all) free market at its best.
You know what’s not the free market? Socialized health care. Yeah, yeah, every developed country with single-payer health care seems to love it, and their citizens are utterly befuddled by our system’s exorbitant costs and poor results. But when you take taxes from people and use them to provide a service for free, that’s nothing but plain ol’ socialism.
Unless you’re talking about school voucher programs, like the CHOOSE Act. Then, totally capitalism. What’s more capitalist, after all, than making sure rich kids get a leg up by using the tax dollars from poor people to supplement their private school educations at institutions not beholden to the same standards as public schools? That’s just how economics works, OK?
Definitely socialism: All of these social program handouts, like food stamps and housing assistance and welfare. If you add up all of these programs, we spend about $400 billion per year “giving away” money to tens of millions of struggling people.
Definitely NOT socialism: The more than $300 billion in subsidies and tax incentives handed out to the nation’s wealthiest companies. Look, it can’t be socialism if the people we’re giving the money to don’t really need it. That’s just basic finance. Like those six tech companies that benefited the most from Trump’s big, beautiful bill—Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon and JPMorgan. They didn’t really need that $83 billion that they got. But think about how much cooler Bezos’ next yacht is gonna be?
Keep thinking about that yacht when you learn that early childhood education supplements, through the nation’s Head Start program, are also definitely evil, no-good, awful socialism. That’s why the Trump administration is in the process of gutting that program, deregulating it and leaving it to die. Thank goodness.
After all, how else would they fund the massive $22 billion in increased subsidies to America’s top oil and gas companies? They’re now getting a cool $55 billion annually in subsidies, and boy, do they need it. Just last quarter, the top two companies, ExxonMobil and Chevron, earned more than $26 billion in profits. Profits. That’s $290 million per DAY in profits.
Thankfully, our tax code has also recognized what is and isn’t socialism, and as such, we make sure that we rarely appropriately tax our top-earning corporations. Those two oil companies, for example, received nearly $17 billion in direct tax subsidies over the last five years. They paid more in taxes to Nigeria and Saudi Arabia during that time.
Now, look, I get that maybe some of you might see all of this and start to think that it sure seems like the game is rigged against you. And you might even start thinking that maybe people are voting for Democrats, regardless of their religious faiths or their ethnic backgrounds, because they’re the only ones proposing policies that actually address the very real problems facing the poor and working class in America today.
If you think any of that, you’re probably doing too much thinking, and you should instead be afraid of that communist, socialist, radical Islamist transgender athlete.