Felonius Ax of the Billionaires here, reporting from Tampa:
Today, all of our telecommunications companies brought Republican lawmakers and candidates to Tropicana Field for batting practice. Come January, these are the guys who are going to take a bat to Net Neutrality once in for all, so it'll be a home run for us!
On this night when we focus our attention on Paul Ryan, we should take a moment to honor the great work of literature that is his main source of inspiration, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In it, all the industrialists, the CEOs, the people who run America's corporations, form our own little society in the mountains where the ultimate communication between two people is the exchange of money. And everyone else becomes completely paralyzed because there's no one to tell them what to do. That's exactly what would happen if we Billionaires took a powder. Your lives would become so empty and pointless.
There's a particularly inspiring section right when John Galt, the hero who leads the industrialists out of town, takes over the radio station. He spends the next 60 pages outlining in painstaking detail Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy. Do not skim! You have to read every single precious word. Paul Ryan did, and soon he's taking the podium as he prepares to get elected Vice President of the United States.
Ayn Rand excoriates altruism and lauds selfishness. And so do we! These are the values that are at the core of Paul Ryan's attempts to reimagine government.
Paul Ryan has a plan for America's economy. He's all about cutting taxes - not all taxes, mind you. Just the ones we pay. The Ryan plan would get rid of Capital Gains taxes, and corporate heroes like Mitt and me will only have to part with a manageable 1% of our money every April 15th, instead of an unbearable 12 or 13%.
I hear the rest of you whining at the perceived injustice of this because you're all paying over 30% in taxes. But you people never get to hold on to very much money, so you don't have a chance to get as attached to it as we do. Don't worry, there's a place for you in the new Ryan tax plan. We're still counting on you to do our share because someone has to foot the bill for the huge subsidies our petrochemical and agribusiness companies and weapons contractors depend on.
We're very excited about Paul Ryan's plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program. Not right away of course - we're counting on the people who are senior citizens now to be selfish enough not to care that the program will have been gutted for everyone younger than them. But soon, senior citizens will have to grab that voucher and scramble to try to buy health insurance that will cover at least a portion of their health care costs, and it will be our insurance companies that will be reaping the benefits.
And we're going one better. We're going to create new investment instruments based on old folks' mad, frantic attempts to stay alive as long as possible. Brokerage firms will soon be offering Not-A-Lot-of-Future Futures so investors can put money down on when particular geezers will succumb to the ailments that we don't cover. So it's really a win-win. Meaning we win and we win again!
And with Paul Ryan by Mitt's side in the White House, we can finally take another stab at privatizing Social Security. Our Georgie bobbled the ball on this project 8 years ago, but he didn't have all three branches of the government as completely in his pay as Mitt will when our Super-Pacs are done vilifying all the non-Billionaire-friendly candidates.
It's about creating an "Ownership Society." Right now, most Americans have a low opinion of Wall Street. But when we replace Social Security, with individual privatized retirement accounts, where all their retirement money will be invested in our companies on Wall Street, they'll have a lot more incentive to care deeply about our companies' well-being.
Imagine if one of our gas companies is contaminating groundwater with chemicals from our Fracking operations (you don't have to imagine too hard, because it's actually happening!) As a result, the people living in the community where the cancer cluster develops sue us. Right now, the average person would be rooting for the citizens standing up to the big, evil gas company. However, if their retirement money were invested with us, they'd be rooting for our team of highly paid lawyers to crush their public interest attorney in court like the loathsome bug that he is.
Right now, when someone gets downsized, they have bitter feelings toward us for sending them packing. But what if that person was one of our investors? Those feelings would become bittersweet, because they would recognize that it was our downsizing of tens of thousands of workers like them that goosed up the price of their stocks.
Our new owner/investors, the American people will cheer s on as we make shoddy products which fail, as we crush workers' attempts to unionize, as we rush drugs to the market which cause cancer in rats, because these tried and true policies are going to send their stocks through the roof!
Oh, I gotta go. Paul Ryan's taking the podium. I'm quivering with joy just thinking about the kind of America that he will help us achieve!
This has been Felonius Ax of the Billionaires, reporting from Tampa.