Ted Cruz Fights Against Workers

This week includes Labor Day, a celebration of the workers who actually do the jobs that allow us to have food on the table, clothes on our backs, and roofs over our heads.

Last week Senator Ted Cruz sent out one of his email blasts touting his four week tour around the state and purported accomplishments in Congress. Among the topics included in the email was his tour of a Bitcoin mining operation in Rockdale, TX a rural town between Austin and Bryan/College Station. Bitcoin is one of the more well-known brands of cyptocurrency. The facility is a big warehouse style building with rack upon rack of computers and huge amounts of air conditioning drawing a significant fraction of the total electricity used in the entire town while providing very few jobs. In Cruz’s email he says he is proud to “lead the fight to promote and protect this burgeoning sector of our economy.” That’s really interesting since when he campaigned for president in 2016 one of his “big ideas” was to return to the gold standard, something antithetical to the whole concept of cryptocurrency.  I’m not sure if this is a flip flop on his views or pandering to a segment of his campaign donors.

Cruz also pushed his effort to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, a scheme that would leave millions of federal employees without a paycheck since half of federal revenue comes from income taxes. Cruz is fear-mongering that the 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service employees that the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act authorizes will somehow take food off the table of average Americans when in fact due to Republican led budget cuts the agency has been unable to investigate wealthy tax cheats for decades. If you don’t cheat on your taxes you as an individual have nothing to worry about especially if you are filing on Form 1040-EZ or a basic 1040A as nearly all the info you enter is already available to the IRS. The only people who benefit from fewer IRS employees are wealthy tax cheats, a group who if they actually paid their fair share would pay more than five times as much as the salaries of those additional IRS employees.

Cruz is also fighting against President Biden’s effort to forgive student loans, an effort that stands to improve the lives of 43 million people while boosting the economy. Cruz called folks who work at coffee shops and have student loans slackers. I don’t know about you but anytime I walk into a coffee shop the folks there are hustling to take care of the customers in line, that’s not slacker behavior.

The rest of his email is about Cruz talking to local government officials and business people but he apparently couldn’t be bothered to speak to average workers and struggling parents. Let’s remember that Ted Cruz spends his time in congress fighting for the wealthiest among us to pay less taxes and get more federal contracts, while hundreds of thousands of Texans aren’t sure when they’ll eat their next meal and can’t afford medical care to ease their suffering or protect their lives.

 Published in the Seguin Gazette - September 7, 2022