The GOP tax cut plan in the Senate ran into the Senate rules, requiring fiscal responsibility vis-à-vis the deficit, and the GOP sided with the corporations / wealthy getting the permanent tax cut, and workers being temporary beneficiaries.

Dem Ron Wyden tried to enter an amendment that the corporate cuts should expire as well, if wages don't rise - as the Republicans claim they will under their plan - and Dem Sherrod Brown followed up the offense, suggesting the cuts are really about giving protect to the wealthy, leading to Orrin's widely covered tantrum where he claims he's been a champion of the poor his whole life, having started there, himself, etc.

For those inclined / able to follow Hatch's invitation to look deeper, the tax cut plan looks worse and worse: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...=.21f54f1abd05

Meanwhile, back in Utah, a bankruptcy watchdog report shows more than half of Utah workers have less than $1000 in savings, with 4-5 times that amount in credit card debt. https://www.deseretnews.com/article/...ls-around.html

Combining this with the D-News / LDS Church regularly exhorting young adults to form families and have children, we're seeing what economists and the CIA (through their GINI index) have been saying for quite some time: widening economic inequalities lead to a whole host of problems, within nations. (The GINI index was created to assess instability in other countries.)

It's not hard to see where the tax cuts - coming toward the end of an extended bull run in the economy - might lead to, when the expansion fizzles and we go into recession: ballooning deficits, which will pressure tax increases on the working and middle classes, with Social Security and Medicare cuts, as corporations / the wealthy remain unscathed.

Back to the problem of young adults and a new generation of families being economically threatened - along with the declining birthrate, etc - and you have a conservative-accelerated decline of the family, and a nation inching closer toward the social problems typically found in third world nations.

(My son served a mission in Paraguay, where kids were being born... to parents who shack up & often break up, with very rough economic conditions leading most to conclude that marriage is an institution for the better off. In one letter home he was so happy to find potential converts who were "already married!!!!", ie, he didn't have to try and get them married first.)

LDS conservatives here are pushing the notion that marriage itself leads to prosperity - which, like everything else, is probably partially true - but based on rapidly widening inequalities and a stunningly tough job market for the non-brilliant, and the LDS church may as well start preparing training programs for young LDS adults to be prepared to weather through raising a family like their great grandparents did... during the Great Depression.

After all, Orrin Hatch achieved great wealth and power, though coming from poverty. Why can't everyone else do the same?