The Three Card Monte of Republican Tax "Reform"

Republican tax reform [sic] always means tax cuts, first of all.

Tax cuts means tax cuts for the rich, not for working people or the middle class, at least not significantly, and certainly not guaranteed.

So the Republicans negotiate a "Tax Reform" bill with Democrats, who demand that it contain some benefits for working people and the middle class, things that will help restore the economic balance, fixing the imbalances caused by the top-favoring of 35 years of Republican tax and labor policies.

After the bill is passed, if it is passed, there are mechanisms in the bill, put there by “strict budget disciplinarians” to claw back any benefits that are judged "unaffordable." (Insincere Sad Face)

These middle class benefits in the tax reform [sic] bill will be judged unaffordable when, quelle surprise, it turns out tax cuts do not actually result in revenue increases. So obligations to working people are always unaffordable and promises made to working people are always contingent and easily backed out of. Benefits to rich people are always sacred and guaranteed. This became true in the years since 1980 when Reaganomics became an American religion, a fake promise.

This fake promising is similar to the way back-end participation works in Hollywood: you are promised profit participation on the profits of a blockbuster film but these profits are carefully wiped out by the payouts distributed to the producers further up the food chain, after which there is seldom any left. (Insincere Sad Face)

It is also similar to the way Donald Trump’s many many independent contractors were left unpaid by Trump Inc. “Sorry. None left. Sue me.” (Trump doesn't pretend to be sad he can't pay, he just smiles.)

When this kind of scheme enables the Republicans in government to screw the working people and pay off the rich it has twin benefits (for Republicans): it makes the rich clientele very happy and likelier to share their booty in the form of campaign donations and lucrative jobs on retirement, while making working people hate government, which is the second most important objective of the Republicans, who hate government.

There is the phrase Republicans once used to demonize Democratic tax policy: the Two Santa Clauses. The Democratic Santa offers government help to the less fortunate. The Republican Santa offers tax cuts to the more fortunate, but also to the middle classes who feel the tax burden and buy the idea that lower taxes raise dividends.

But the Republicans have turned this on its head. They do deliver like Santa to the rich, but they also benefit by turning the Democratic Santa into a Democratic villain who demands taxes, who gouges the middle classes via taxes, and whose payout to the middle class and working people is unaffordable because the Republicans have already paid it out to their clients. And the Republicans make damn sure the taxes on Democrats rise every year as the taxes on Republicans go down, or at on least rich Republicans. When Republicans see their taxes go up they ALWAYS blame Democrats.

So the benefits of tax cuts and easy evasions and wonderful tax subsidies to the rich are ironclad and eternal whether the federal budget is fully funded or short of cash. Cuts are sacred and guaranteed.

Meanwhile the benefits to the people who work for a living are contingent upon how well the budgets balance out, similar to the way Trump screws his contractors and film companies screw the less preferred classes of producers and profit participants. The phrase “Sorry, but we can’t afford it” is often used. And the middle class being screwed understands the phrase. It's too familiar. It's a part of the game.

The rich are entitled to their tax free ride because their entitlement is figured out first. Once they’ve eaten their fill the leftovers are counted out for the less rich and there is seldom enough left to fulfill those obligations.

Again. Rich entitlements are sacred and guaranteed. Payouts always begin at the top.

Working class entitlements are contingent and often reneged on. The way Trump screws the people he hires. The way the rich have screwed working people for centuries.

Promise and fail to deliver. This is done in a planned and deliberate way.

This ritual doesn’t stain the rich who ate all the working class entitlements (who demanded to eat those entitlements, who demonized those entitlements in careful ways over recent decades) it stains the government, helping to teach generations of working people that government is not to be trusted., that government is a thief, that government is the enemy.

After all, it was the government who stepped in and began passing laws to hoist the workers out of permanent poverty. That is how the rich learned to hate government: because it was a better Santa Claus than the rich employers were who tossed out niggling scraps at Christmastime but screwed the poor the rest of the year. The rich needed to make their benefits immune from workers’ hatred and opposition and needed to kill the liberal/progressive Santa Claus of government, who was more than a gift giver, he was also a Superman, a hero, a protector, a guarantor of fair play in the economy. Fair play was and is anathema to the rich and their Republican agents.

The Unfair Economy

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been in the news recently for enforcing inhumane work conditions not seen since the days of the Spanish galley slave.

The LATimes has an excellent write up about it.

The 1% tell us how to live and how hard to work. They create the economy the rest of us endure. They evade taxes like billy-o and we get to pay for them, or learn to live without good roads and decent schools.

Gyrations in the stock markets terrify the rest of us, but the 1% go shopping (as the NYTimes reported recently). Market instability that worries us they see as opportunity to buy up bargain shares. They profit from volatility. It is their environment of choice, they create it, it profits them enormously (as Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine has explained) but they don’t have to experience it. Their lives are serene and insulated.

Desirable places to live like London, Paris and New York are the setting for a vast new wave of social cleansing, quietly deporting the poor and inviting the rich in.

Reported in the Guardian.

And in a Guardian opinion piece.

Curbed reports how social cleansing is being carried out in New York.

The New York Daily News reports how, in many cases, the new multimillion dollar pieds a terre are seldom inhabited, so the poor and the working classes are being pushed out just in case some rich people would like to spend a weekend in the city.

Pulitzer Prize winning economics reporter David Cay Johnston has this explanation of how the 1% play the American economy and tax system like a violin.

The rich are not like you and me. Why do we cater to them? Why do we walk in the street so they can enjoy the sidewalk? Why do we vacate our cities for their convenience? Why do we pay their taxes for them? Why do we do what they tell us at work and in the voting booth? Are we their slaves? Possibly. By choice, apparently.

Kiss Up. Kick Down. The Series Continues.

The richest man in Congress explains that poor Americans are the envy of the world. (From CNN Money)

Being Rich is a Game. (From Gawker) (Several years ago I considered turning The Rule of Accumulated Advantage into a board game. I realized only rich attractive people whose parents have powerful connections would want to play it, and decided to price it at $5 million dollars per game.)

This pundit at Jacobin Magazine seems to be looking at the inequality problem with his head turned sideways. Interesting though.)

The Republican Congress wants to tell poor people what they can and cannot eat. (from Wonkette)

Billionaires are advising poor working people to learn to live like the poor people they are. (BlueNationReview) (The rich are so tactful.)

Does this surprise anyone? (CommonDreams reports how the rich don't care about jobs.)

At a certain point, the rules that favor the rich enable them to levitate, tax-free, obligation-free, no strings attached. (from FirstLook)

The rich meanwhile get us to pay their costs of doing business. (From The Guardian)

Really bad ideas that favor a small fraction of Americans (if any) can gain traction if there is a lot of money behind them.

For Profit Prisons are a huge growth sector. (from Alternet)

The rich don't experience failure like the rest of us. (The New Republic) Again, they're immune.

Is it all of our own making? (Robert Reich thinks maybe it is.)

One thing that makes the rich eligible for all the breaks and the perks is this Republican mythology that tells us they're simply better at everything, more competent, more hardworking, more careful, wiser, more honest. And when their party rules the economy it does better. Well, it ain't true. (from Salon)

The Final Sorting

We are distorting the way our economy works, refashioning and refitting it to serve fewer people and thereby cutting more people out of it. The rich are behaving in a completely predictable way. The more we pay them the more they want, and every desire is quickly turned into a basic need.

(I wrote about this over a decade ago and nobody thought it was worth discussing.)

For the rest of us every basic need is redefined an expensive option, a remote "maybe", something we’re not entitled to.

It’s gotten to the point where the word “entitlement" is used as a pejorative term. We, who work for a living, are no longer entitled to anything. And the small minority of people who own for a living are entitled to everything.

We need to relearn what history taught us. We can allow people to grow rich, but being rich must bring obligations too. (Here's a good history lesson about this from the Washington Post. Anybody remember Magna Carta? We should have learned something from how England created its democracy.)

The bad old days were barely a century ago. (Does anyone remember the Ludlow Massacre?) We earned a better living standard the hard way. Our parents and grandparents got fed up and changed things. They organized, and elected a president who believed they had the right to be organized. That has been undone since.

In the past thirty years this has all been taken away and we have let it be taken away.

Kiss Up, Kick Down

What does it say about our modern values that we always give the benefit of the doubt to the wealthy and assume the worst about the poor? Here's an article from the Guardian about how we punish the poor for being poor.

Everybody agrees it’s wasteful to throw money at the poor. A lazy way of thinking. But the rich? So much is given to them you couldn’t begin to throw it, it has to be delivered in semi trucks, in supertankers. Everybody’s giving money to them, so it must be a good thing. That’s lazy too, and wasteful in much larger amounts. The rich get so much it seems to justify giving them everything. Rich people pass us in the street and without thinking we hand them the contents of our wallets. We buy them drinks and lunch, pay their parking meters, polish their cars, kiss their feet. Here's an article from Vox describing how the rich get richer no matter how lousy they are at their jobs, assuming they have one.

Poor people, though? Ugh. Let’s criminalize poverty. Let’s fine them for being poor and charge them a fee for being unable to pay the fine and imprison them when they cannot pay the fee for nonpayment of fines. This accomplishes two things: it teaches the poor a lesson––not to to be poor––and it adds to the enormous profits we pay to the for-profit prison industry and its wealthy shareholders.

Our society is so clever though. Always innovating. Inventing new ways to kiss up and kick down. Devising new methods for discouraging and penalizing the poor who are already discouraged and penalized and new rituals for worshipping the rich.

Our urban landscape has a new feature: spikes to prevent the homeless from lying down to sleep.

New apartment buildings are being built with separate doors for the rich and the poor. (This way the developers get a tax break for housing us poor folks without forcing the rich to tolerate our company in the elevator.)

Our society used to dish out indignity to one easily identified segment of the population, people with darker skin. The system was called Jim Crow. What will we call this new system?

Sadly, our vocabulary is deficient. We aren’t innovating there. We don’t have words that adequately describe this galloping unfairness. Why? Because in our kissing up we are careful not to cause offense to our betters. We don’t want to hurt the feelings of the rich by explaining how monstrous their privileges are. We don’t want to understand the ways they are robbing us all blind.

Let’s get to work on a fairer vocabulary. Terms like “wage theft” are just coming into use. Let’s see it used more often. Until it was labelled as theft, it seemed perfectly legal for rich employers to do what they were doing. We need to use our language. It’s the only weapon we have left.

“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of who will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.” ~Davis X. Machina

Harder Faster Longer (For Less Pay)

Today's Must Read is from the New York Times. It invites us to be less productive. This sounds like a slacker motto––unhelpful, uncooperative, lacking in the team spirit which is so fashionable these days in workplaces––but consider this: the way we measure productivity requires workers to work longer and harder and better for less pay each year. That's how managers meet their benchmarks. That's why 40 years of productivity gains have been paid upward, not to the workers achieving them. How is that fair?

The same harder/faster/longer ethos has crept into our schools. Each year schools and teachers and students are expected to achieve higher marks, the way a business is expected to. But it's fundamentally stupid and impractical. Teachers start over every year with new kids, at roughly the same level as the kids who came before. Yet the gains of the past year are used to compound the expectations.

I am not adept at figuring compound interest, but I figure that with a yearly rise in student achievement of say 2%, compounded annually, measured over the past 40 years since I was in school, that kids today have to be ten times or a hundred times smarter, quicker and more knowledgeable than they were in 1972. Are their brains larger? I've not noticed it. But the work load is much larger. The kids burn out quicker too. The teachers are teaching 45 in a class on the same pay and lower school funding measured against inflation.

This is what happens when you invite businessmen to run your society. They turn up the speed on the machine and pocket the profits or bank them in the Caribbean. That is the model being sold this year by the Republican Party. It's the package they been selling us for four decades. It burned our economy out in 2007 and 2008, but they're still driving the car.

The Just World Bias

There's an excellent column in The Guardian by Oliver Burkeman. You probably know a lot of positive thinkers. Share this column with them.

There is a belief out there that people get what they deserve. That rape victims asked for it. That poor people deserve to be homeless and hungry. As Herman Cain says to cheering Republican crowds, "If you don't have a job, blame yourself!" The people with money and power like the "just world bias" because it justifies their good luck. It turns them from lucky people into nobility.

In today's StarTribune a column by former Strib business reporter Mike Meyers describes how the Republican Party shapes our tax system to help the rich and punish the poor.

If you go to one of those new, very large, very successful "Christian" churches, I suggest you raise your hand and ask about this. I'm sure your pastor has a ready answer. Maybe Jesus was wrong about the less fortunate. Or maybe He really preferred rich people.

The 1% Is Fine, Thanks For Asking

The New York Times headline reads "Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds". The story will spoil your lunch.

The Washington Post reports the same results under a different headline: "Nation’s wealthiest 1 percent triple their incomes, according to CBO report." The Times didn't want to upset the mandarin class too much. Double sounds less unfair than triple.

Either way the upper upper upper class is eating our lunch. And breakfast and dinner. Maybe the message is that once you are so very rich it doesn't matter whether your income tripled or doubled. Who can keep track? Poor them, with all that income to sort out. What a headache; let's give them some more tax breaks to help them deal with it.

Another thing that's making lives more unequal is that so much more of the government's "help" is dished out to people who don't need it but just heard it was available. Imagine if rich people demanded equal access to food stamps. Rich farmers and big farmers get more relief than poor and small farmers. Big companies get more help than the small businesses who stand in as the poster children of the Chamber of Commerce (which has been screwing them for decades.)

The financial rescue was supposed to help all of us, but notice who butted to the front of the line. The too-big-to-fail banks and financial companies and major corporations (many of whom, like GE, have bigger financial services sides than their old manufacturing sides) hogged it all. They are hoarding trillions, refusing to share it, pay it out, invest it or use it to hire people or order inventory.

They are using it instead to give enormous bonuses to their tip top people. Goldman Sachs reported a $393 million loss this past quarter, but that's a fraction of the $10 billion bonuses it will pay to its executives for delivering that loss. Go figure.

Never mind, it doesn't compute. Heads they win, tails they win. The 1% always win, the 99% always lose. At least since Reagan changed the rules.

Income Inequality is Killing Us

This short TED lecture by Richard Wilkinson is worth watching and sharing. You might want to pause the video, as I did, to look more closely at the graphs. The TED lecture series is wonderful, a great place to learn from the best minds out there.

I like Professor Wilkinson's statement at one point, looking at a graph on upward mobility: "If you really want to live the American Dream I suggest you move to Denmark." I don't remember who he was quoting. Income inequality is killing us, but it's also making us miserable while we're alive. This is what is putting people into the streets.

Richard Wilkinson is an epidemiologist and professor at Nottingham University, and founder of the Equality Trust.

Not All Bootstraps Are Created Equal

The sting is in the tail of this short piece:

"One of the most remarkable findings from the Pew Charitable Trusts' Economic Mobility Project is that a child from a family in the top income quintile who does not get a college degree is more likely to wind up in the top income quintile himself than a child from a family in the bottom income quintile who does get a college degree." (There's a link to the data.) Money flows from advantage more than from hard work or ability. Especially in our new and very unequal economy.

Lane Kenworthy writes a blog from Arizona that questions many of the conservative talking points. Worth visiting. Conservative mantras serve their masters by addressing the simpler minded with simple nostrums, often misleading ones. Here is one that unravels given a little scrutiny. Short but hard to squeeze into a soundbite.

Often the "evidence" offered for giving greater and greater reward and advantage to the people at the top is bad evidence, or distorted evidence. Which causes a person to wonder: who pays the sifters of evidence? Is this just another advantage owned by the people at the top? The thinkers and sifters, the judges and lawmakers, the lenders and credit raters, the newspapers and other media that inform us, all belong to them.

I wish the New York Review of Books spent more time on books and less on policy, but what the MSM won't tackle, they must. And they do it intelligently.

I dislike it when the very advantaged and comfortable, many of whom succeeded with a leg up from their families or connections, wonder aloud why the poor and the less fortunate aren't trying harder. It's hard work being poor, with none of the rewards. They should try it.