Millions of "Joe the Plumber"s
A friend and neighbor has been unemployed from his blue-collar factory floor managerial position over a year. Since his factory was closed, the federal government has been paying him an income AND paying for two years of expensive training in a totally new field of his choosing. His family is also receiving free food every week. Bet you can’t guess his biggest political issue… taxes!
Millions of Americans are dumb as rocks regarding basic economic realities. They’re scared to death of the “death tax,” even though there’s virtually no chance their “estate” will pay a penny in estate tax because the first $3,500,000 was exempt in 2009 (before the estate tax insanely expired in 2010).
These sad fools keep voting Republican because Republicans pretend to represent them and pretend to be fighting to keep their taxes down. Instead, Republicans in D.C. fight to keep corporate taxes low and the wealthiest Americans' taxes low. Democrats have fought to lower taxes on the lower and middle classes. (About half of Americans pay no federal income tax.) Poor Republican voters fail to realize Republicans routinely exploit their ignorance for their votes. As Warren Buffett famously wrote, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Rich corporations, hedge fund managers and the like fund right-wing foundations and disinformation campaigns that induce tens of millions to vote against their self interest. Millions in political contributions reap billions in lower taxes.
The reality could not be more stark in the current political debate, in which the Republicans are fighting for massive tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires even while claiming they’re fighting to balance the budget:
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
That’s the backdrop for one of the first big postelection fights in Washington — how far to extend the Bush tax cuts to the most affluent 2 percent of Americans. Both parties agree on extending tax cuts on the first $250,000 of incomes, even for billionaires. Republicans would also cut taxes above that.
The richest 0.1 percent of taxpayers would get a tax cut of $61,000 from President Obama. They would get $370,000 from Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. And that provides only a modest economic stimulus, because the rich are less likely to spend their tax savings.
At a time of 9.6 percent unemployment, wouldn’t it make more sense to finance a jobs program? For example, the money could be used to avoid laying off teachers and undermining American schools.
The economic interests of at least 90% of Americans are aligned with traditional Democratic Party values (even if many Democratic Party leaders — including our current “Democratic” president — routinely sell those traditional values out). That so many vote Republican attests to how horrid our educational system has become. Millions of Americans cannot correctly identify which of two parties better represents their interests.
Posted by James on Monday, November 08, 2010