Above: "The Middle Class," a lithograph by Elizabeth Olds (1896-1991), created ca. 1939. Olds did several artworks for the WPA, but it's not clear if this is one of them. In any event, it's a great piece that seems to depict the timeless strategy of the wealthy to distract, divide, and get the working-class riled up into a frenzy over this or that issue, while they make off with more and more of the working-class's money. Image from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The rich are stealing our tax dollars to feed their insatiable appetite for money and luxury
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has been making a point lately that is worth repeating - indeed, worth repeating over and over and over again. And that is this: The wealthy used to pay much higher taxes to help fund the government. But in the past few decades, after purchasing politicians and bamboozling the public, they've had their tax responsibility greatly reduced and now increasingly fund the government by lending to the government. This has ballooned the national debt to over $40 trillion!
(Robert Reich, "Who’s Raking it in as the National Debt Explodes? What the wealthy and powerful--and Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent--don’t want you to know," Substack, August 20, 2026.)
And so now, a significant portion of our tax dollars go towards interest payments to the rich, when that money could be going towards infrastructure improvements; increased Medicaid funding (so that, for example, the elderly aren't neglected and abused in nursing homes as much); expanding Social Security (so that maybe, just maybe, we can retire and not have to work for billionaires until we're 95); and so on.
The social safety net has been shredded; our infrastructure has been substandard for decades; the rich have received several rounds of massive tax cuts (Reagan, Bush Jr., Trump I, and Trump II); the working-class has been burdened with more and more regressive revenue systems (taxes, tolls, fees, fines, etc., at the state and local level); the national debt has surpassed $40 trillion; and now we're paying taxes--or should we call them tithes?--to our rich Gods, in order to pay the interest on their lending to the government - a government that was supposed to be We the People but has now been converted into We the Suckers.
As if all this were not bad enough, the rich didn't even fulfill their end of the trickle-down economics bargain: to create so many great jobs, through their magical investments, that it would be like manna falling from Heaven. Instead, they've created a nation filled to the brim with low-paid b.s. jobs, gig work, and jobs with no pension plans (most 401(k)s are not pension plans - they're tools of distraction that most people can't significantly contribute to, because wages have been stagnant since the 1970s).
Republicans are mostly to blame for this economic and social catastrophe, because of their decades-long obsession with tax cuts for the rich. But Corporate Democrats share some of the blame too, for (a) failing to properly message what's going on, (b) failing to aggressively and consistently push for more progressive taxation (as well as other progressive policies), and (c) abandoning their New Deal heritage.
Will the voters ever learn? Or, are we in a continuous downward spiral where the voters will forever have their money siphoned off to the rich, as they're being distracted by one manufactured outrage after another?
No comments:
Post a Comment