Did You Catch the Grinch?

People are frustrated they and their children aren’t doing as well as their parents. There’s a grinch out there mucking things up. Did you catch it? It’s time to lock it up!

How come our parents’ did well? Education and immigration! !! Think mines and factories were staffed and roads and railroads built by the sons and daughters of the American Revolution? We got immigrants to do the dirty jobs – Chinese, Irish, Poles, all kinds of immigrants plus immigrants lured under false pretenses and then treated like slaves. America burst into an industrial powerhouse beginning with the Civil War when unlimited immigrants came. We bought, ate, rode and drove on what they made. They still want to do all that for the rest of us but we no longer let them. The jobs are different now – including agricultural and essential work – but the needs are still there.

And we used to make sure to educate them. Without education and immigration we’d be subsistence farmers with little to show for our efforts. Before the land grant colleges, authorized during the Civil War and financed with federal investment, our methods of agriculture were medieval. Without both education and immigration there’d be no infrastructure, no industry, no hospitals, no health systems.

The Republican response is cut, block and deport. Block and deport immigrants so there aren’t enough workers and nothing gets done except for complaining about inflation. Send back those who grew up here and let them take their educations somewhere else. They must imagine we’d be healthy if we could keep out all those who want to be our nurses, aides and doctors – you think we graduate enough doctors by ourselves? Silly.

Cut, block and deport. Cut their rich friends’ taxes. Cut every program, starting with Social Security, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act that benefits anyone else, and let most of us, including essential workers, squirm. Cut jobs and education because there’s no money. And there’s no money because Republican penny pinchers cut taxes for themselves and their rich friends!

The tax system has been continuously distorted by the wealthiest Americans and their corporations since 1980. The marginal tax rate for average Americans has been about a fifth of their income from 1970 to the present. In 1970, however, the top tax rate for the wealthy, paid only on their top dollars, was 70%. But the maximum tax rate, regardless of earnings, declined to 37% or about 3/8s of however much income they declare, and the wealthy actually pay much less because they have access to tax deductions and loopholes that most of us don’t. Remember Warren Buffet who was outraged to discover that his secretary paid a higher tax rate than he did.  No wonder we “can’t afford” anything – can’t afford to repair roads, water systems, or keep schools functioning at the same high level we benefitted from when we and our parents went to school. The grinches are making out like bandits.

Frankly, the wealthy ought to pay more than average Americans. They don’t need those high dollars as much as ordinary Americans need every penny of what they make. And they get a lot more benefits from government. Just ask their lobbyists!

So, did you find the Grinch? Lock it up and ship it out on the big plane Woody Guthrie labeled “Deportees.”

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on January 3, 2023.

Here’s a holiday present

Here’s a holiday present – no important government programs require any hike in your taxes. Some politicians, particularly but not exclusively Republican, want you to believe that anything good that government does will come straight out of your pocket. But that says more about what they want to make happen than anything that necessarily or logically comes from running valuable government programs. It’s all about who the politicians want to make pay the taxes. Remember Warren Buffet who was outraged to discover that his secretary paid a higher tax rate than he did. That’s because some politicians have been lowering the tax rates of their rich friends for decades and therefore leaving it to the rest of us to pay to keep government working. There’s nothing about the American economy that wouldn’t support American workers the way it did a few decades ago – the difference is all in the tax rates. And it’s time Americans put an end to that tax theft.

Republicans have been cutting taxes to the wealthiest Americans since 1980. They’ve be giving us all sorts of explanations why that’s good for all of us. But the income of America’s working people has been been stagnant for half a century while their buying power has been declining. That’s not trickle-down – that’s just a failure to serve America honorably.

There’s no reason for that to continue. There is plenty of wealth in America and it’s absolutely fair and proper for working men and women to share the growth in America’s wealth that they have made possible. The only reason they have not is called lobbyists. It’s not a failure of America’s working people. It’s a failure of Republican willingness to let America’s working people share the wealth. There’s no reason for Republican members of Congress to scare America’s working men and women that their Social Security won’t be there for them in order to satisfy their very wealthy campaign donors who do not and never will rely on those Social Security dollars – especially given that those Social Security dollars have already been paid for as insurance. The same goes for Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare.

Senator Warren of Massachusetts, Senator Sanders of Vermont and Senator Gillibrand of New York have collaborated on a modest wealth tax proposal:

2% on the net worth of households and trusts over $50 million and

a 1% surtax on the net worth of households and trusts over $1 billion.

My retirement savings don’t come close to the minimum estate subject to the tax, though IRS rules force me to disgorge what I have regularly so they can get the taxes on what were tax free investments. It’s OK – paying my taxes is a privilege of citizenship. But if they can do that with my much smaller retirement savings, they ought to be able to do it to the sacrosanct wealth of America’s superrich. It’s hard for me even to imagine having a billion dollars.

What Warren, Sanders and Gillibrand are proposing will cover lots more than the Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare insurance programs, and all of them will be good for America. Unlike the tax cuts Republicans are so attached to, improving the financial position of America’s working people does work, it goes straight into the economy which means their proposal will be good for everyone, unlike Republican trickle-down fantasies.

As Jack Metzgar wrote for Inequality.org, “Every time I hear that we as a nation cannot afford something — whether that might be assuring non-toxic water in Jackson and Flint or universal pre-K or an industrial policy with teeth — I have wondered how many dollars a national wealth tax might yield.” His answer is: “We Can’t Afford NOT to Have a Wealth Tax.”

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on December 20, 2022.