The Rich Should Be Paying More—and Yes, That Means Me
The last 50 years have been a sickening catastrophe for the working class, a slow-motion emergency that unfolded right under our noses. Here we stand, with more wealth disparity than ever, with the super-wealthy unabashedly demanding ever more for themselves, and with an oligarchic president and Congress readying to offer us another tax break. This cut will come in spite of poll after poll showing that the inequity is intolerable to the general public, and that the wealthy should be taxed more. All this has been happening while, at the behest and with the loyal assistance of the world’s richest man, the federal government continues to be strip-mined. As clunky and inefficient as our government is, its condition—once DOGE gets done with it—will be feeble enough to drown in Grover Norquist’s notorious bathtub.
Were you worried about corruption? Well, I hope you’ve had your seat belts buckled while Elon Musk wielded his sword of Damocles over the departments from which he stands to gain contracts, payment, and influence, and by which he would otherwise be regulated. Watch as Peter Thiel and Bill Ackman cheer on the disassembly of the American university system, all the while preparing their business plans for the for-profit system with which they’d like to replace it. Were you worried about war? Well, our billionaire president has all sorts of fresh ideas about that. Nepotism? We are about to see what real affirmative action looks like.
Months into his tenure, Ronald Reagan attacked unions and public education, paralyzed the Environmental Protection Agency, stripped the public sector, and finished that all up with massive tax cuts. He also left behind a government in greater debt than when his term started. George W. Bush gave us a tax cut we didn’t need, started two wars with no clear objectives and no exit plans, and led our government from the surplus Bill Clinton had left behind to a deficit from which we have never recovered. In Trump 1.0, we got another unnecessary tax cut, the benefits of which went almost exclusively to the very wealthy, which created no jobs, and is estimated to have added nearly $2 trillion to the national debt.
Advocates of that 2017 tax cut promised that rising wages for working people would “trickle down” from the top, but it didn’t exactly work out that way. Those in the bottom 90 percent of company income distributions saw no change in their earnings, while CEO salaries soared, and corporations directed roughly 80 percent of their increased cash flow not to workers, but to stock buybacks and dividend payouts, And remember: The richest 10 percent own over 90 percent of shares. As workers have been asked to do ever more for wages that never rise commensurate with productivity, much less inflation, CEO pay has ballooned from around 42 times the average worker’s pay in 1980 to an outrageous 538 times today, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. At every turn, the wealth keeps on trickling upward, defying gravity, logic, and any promises made along the way.
