Everyone knows that the richest one percent in America has more wealth than the entire bottom 50%. We have the greatest income inequality and widest wealth gap in the developed world. We also know that wealth can legally buy an uncapped tsunami of political campaign messaging under that horrific plutocratic ruling in the 2010 Supreme Court case of Citizens United vs. FEC, a decision legalizing campaign measures favoring the rich that constitutes criminality in many other democratic nations. Everything, from political power, government assistance (particularly for COVID-related issues) and benefits, to tax issues to minimum wages favors those who don’t need favors. That federal minimum wage, still $7.25 (unchanged since 1997), is a joke, but Republicans have blocked an increase for decades.
Indeed, the wealthy and political representatives have sold America a bill of goods on a policy, which I keep harping on, that sounds good but has never worked EVER. It’s based on the premise that if you reduce taxes for the rich, they will rush out and create massive numbers of high paying jobs. Instead, with the massive surpluses left over after buying a new Bentley or hot Ferrari to park at their additional vacation home with a private dock, where their ocean-capable yacht is moored, their priority is stock repurchases for their public corporation or perhaps a corporate acquisition of a bargain company or piles of foreclosed real estate that are no longer affordable.
No one who ever grew wealth spends money to create jobs without a solid business plan and a market demand analysis. This “supply side/trickle down/don’t tax the job creators” immutable Republican platform retained since Ronald Reagan was president has been a consistent failure, but it never dies.
If that’s not bad enough, efforts to help 90% of Americans – like national healthcare (which is available every other first world developed nation) or sensible childcare (the lack of which keeps over a million women out of the job market and is also standard in most developed countries) – are typically mislabeled as “creeping socialism” to scare righteous, hardworking, wage-earning Americans. See my recent The Vocabulary of Oppression and Disinformation, which addresses fake wordplay used to manipulate voters to back the rich or minority extremist views.
The 2017 Trump-era corporate reduction of corporate taxes from 35% to 21% produced all of the above horribles without creating those promised jobs or paying for itself by generating lots more in taxable revenues. All we got was bigger deficits that saddle “the rest of us.” And if you think all we need to do is hire more IRS revenue agents to control those loopholes that the rich drive their Bentleys through, think again. Michael Hitzik, writing for the March 14th Los Angeles Times, tells us that the IRS focuses so much more on auditing "little guys" compared to taking deep dives into sophisticated-accountant/lawyer-prepared tax returns from the rich:
“The figures show that the lowest-income wage earners, defined as those eligible for the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, were audited at a rate of 13 per 1,000 returns in 2021. For everyone else, the rate was 2.6 per 1,000 returns… For married couples with no children, eligibility was capped for the current tax year at adjusted gross income of $22,610. The ceiling rises with family size, but the maximum income this year, for households with three or more children, is $53,057… It’s impossible to overstate how unjust and wasteful this is. These families tend to be our most financially vulnerable, struggling to pay for basic expenses. They’re the least likely to have professional tax advice, and most likely to have limited education or for English not to be their first language.”
Even Biden’s attempt to expand his infrastructure bill to include economic support for childcare and to replace the child tax credit that expired at the end of 2021– resulting in the largest US children-in-poverty increase (to 17%) in a single month (January) – was extinguished in a bloc GOP vote in the Senate plus two Democrats (Manchin and Sinema) railing under that misused cry of “creeping socialism.” Economic analysis shows that getting a flood of women back into the marketplace would be a productivity enhancer, not a nasty contribution to inflation.
Speaking of inflation, who do you think is hurt worse by higher prices for fossil fuels, which impact pretty much the cost of anything that needs to be transported? Rich folks? Or are those at the bottom of the economic ladder, working up well into the middle, the ones who really suffer. As shares of Big Oil soar, as governments are shying away from a moratorium on gasoline taxes, as oil producing nations are enjoying their revenue increases… we may be witnessing a reset, where prices will come down eventually, but damage to oil/gas production and the ramifications of Putin’s war even if settled by some miracle, suggest that we are not going back to pre-war prices in the foreseeable future. Biden can only exert a very modest impact on the fuel prices. Even if built, the Keystone Pipeline won’t make even a slight dent in the price at the pump; it only makes fossil fuel companies richer. War can be good for business. Very good sometimes.
If you combine the power of rich voices under Citizens United and the attempt by conservative forces, especially in fossil fuel producing states, to stop significant consumer-friendly federal appointments requiring Senate confirmation, well… Any such appointment faces a GOP/Manchin/Siena bloc that tanks any appointee’s prioritizing alternative energy or not supporting programs fostered by Big Oil and Shrinking Coal.
Sarah Bloom Raskin’s nomination to a high post at the Federal Reserve was withdrawn by President Biden on March 15th. “Her withdrawal wasn’t prompted by questions about her qualifications or experience. That could hardly be the case: Raskin had won overwhelming approval from the Senate when she was appointed to the Fed’s board of governors in 2010 and again when President Obama named her a deputy Treasury secretary in 2014… No, Raskin’s nomination was killed by the fossil fuel industry and its caucus in the Senate.
“The final decisive blow was delivered on Monday by Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who said that she had ‘failed to satisfactorily address my concerns about the critical importance of financing an all-of-the-above energy policy to meet our nation’s critical energy needs.’” Los Angeles Times, March 16th. For a look into Senator Manchin’s deeply embedded conflict of interest, see my February 13th Manchin-ian Heresy, Part 2 blog. We watch special interests, agile political manipulators and sheer raw wealth openly displayed as they slowly erode true democracy.
I’m Peter Dekom, and there is indeed an irony that we rail in support of a struggling Ukrainian democracy being invaded by a brutal dictatorship… and let our own nation’s democracy unravel from the pressure of powerful special interests.
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