What should we do about our national deficit? Conservatives propose cutting funding for unnecessary programs, while liberals tend to want to use tax money, particularly from wealthier Americans, to pay it down. The latter suggestion has been met with hellfire and venom from Republicans.
President Reagan is best known for cutting marginal income tax enormously, based on his theory that the wealth would trickle down to the lower classes. In doing so, he also reduced the amount of revenue taken in from taxes.
This decision has not brought about any noticeable changes, except for higher income inequality. Well, whoops, we made a mistake, right? Let’s bring those marginal income taxes back up.
Except we can’t do that because Republicans have taken this arbitrary recommendation of how to tax as gospel. Yet we need to change things, because obviously, this have not been working. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Republicans either need to stop pretending they care about the poor, or change their perspective. In a recent interview with Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, conducted by 60 Minutes, he responded to several proposals that the president made in his State of the Union speech.
When asked, “dead or alive”, how he felt about the proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy, he said “dead. Real dead.” He also said the proposal for free community college was dead, and said raising minimum wage was a bad idea because it would eliminate low-paying jobs and “take the bottom rungs off the economic ladder.”
Yet the economic ladder is in poor shape already. An article on the New York Times website, “The Middle Class is Steadily Eroding,” points out that we are already missing quite a few rungs. The wage gap is very evident when we look at our consumers, and how businesses are reacting to them. Instead of targeting an atrophied middle class, businesses are “chasing richer customers with a wider offering of high-end goods and services, or focusing on rock-bottom prices to attract the expanding ranks of penny-pinching consumers,” the article said.
Income inequality is growing. The middle class is shrinking. We need ways to target our debt, yet, Republicans are adamant about not raising taxes on the rich. I propose we do just that. Why?
Reason number one: they don’t need all that money. They have all of their basic needs taken care of, from food to shelter to healthcare. You do not need three houses and fifteen cars, or a yacht, or a personal plane to survive.
Reason two: they don’t deserve all that money. The top earners work no harder than those at the bottom. Take, for example, a construction worker. We’ll generously assume he makes $45,000 per year. Compare him to an NBA player, who makes on average $4.5 Million per year. That’s 10,000% of what the construction worker makes. One hundred times more. Yet no one would claim he’s doing 100 times the work.
Reason three: it is irresponsible to have that much money while others are suffering. Yes, I am questioning your moral character if you have ridiculous amounts of money and are not helping the less fortunate with it.
People are dying of treatable diseases every day, diseases we cured long ago, because they simply cannot afford the treatment. Others impoverish themselves trying to pay the medical bills. Homes are foreclosed. Minimum wage workers struggle to pay rent for cramped apartments and feed their children the cheapest food they can afford, which is often not healthy.
This isn’t lazy people mooching off the government and scoffing at the success of others. This is people working as hard as or more than the rich, for paltry amounts of money. They need government assistance because we have created a system in which it is not possible to meet all of the needs for decent survival, for living in dignity, without them. And yet, Republicans want to cut these programs as well! This is insanity. This is cruelty. Are we deceiving ourselves, or do we just not care that we’re sucking the life out of our working class?
There is charity work, which seems to be the popular answer for helping the poor. It has good intentions, but clearly isn’t doing enough. The wealthiest among us feel very little responsibility for those in need, or government programs would be entirely unnecessary.
You may call me a bleeding heart liberal, and you’re damn right about that. I’m proud of my empathy for my fellow human beings. I will not deceive myself any longer. It’s time to take a stand.
