In the middle of the last century, there was a large and secure working class. Then, changes to the tax structure distributed more and more of the wealth to the richest and hollowed out the middle class. Now, levels of inequality in the United States are unsustainable as the top one-tenth of one percent (0.1%) has wealth equal to the bottom 80%.
American workers already pay more than enough money to provide good health care to everyone in the country. It’s just that they pay it into a private insurance system that wastes large portions of it on rents and administrative redundancy. As the Mercatus Center noted last year, by implementing a Medicare for All system, the US could insure 30 million more people, provide dental, vision, and hearing coverage to everyone, and virtually eliminate out-of-pocket expenses, all while saving $2 trillion over the first decade of implementation.
The Trump tax bill is the opposite direction the country needs to go at a time of record wealth divides when three people have the wealth of half the population. The Trump tax law made inequality worse as it resulted in a record amount being spent to buy back stock — more than $1 trillion — artificially raising stock prices and increasing top management pay and investment earnings. People know the Trump Tax was for the rich and not them, nearly two-thirds favor its outright repeal. More money for the rich is not invested in the real economy of production but in financial maneuvers like stock buy-backs, which simply rearrange and concentrate who owns the real productive assets of the economy. It would be more productive and efficient to tax the rich and invest that money through the public sector in needed programs, like improved Medicare for All, and needed infrastructure and production, like mass transit and clean energy systems.
The income gap between the rich and everyone else has been growing markedly, by every major statistical measure, for more than 40 years. As of 2017, the richest 0.1 percent take in 188 times as much income as the bottom 90 percent. An estimated 43.5 percent of the U.S. population, 140 million people, are either poor or low-income, according the the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Supplemental Poverty Measure, which is a far more realistic measure of actual living costs compared to the old Official Poverty Line, which simply multiplies the minimum food diet by three. As bad as income inequality is, wealth inequality is even more pronounced. The wealthiest 5 percent own two-thirds of the nation’s wealth: the top 10 percent owns nearly 80 percent of the nation’s wealth. Over the past three decades, the most affluent U.S. families have added dramatically to their net worth, while those on the bottom have dipped into “negative wealth,” i.e., their debts exceed the value of their assets.
A February 2019 poll, found that 76 percent of registered voters want the wealthiest Americans to pay more.
- First, we need to end the regressive payroll tax by lifting the $128,400 cap on Social Security taxes. Currently, undocumented immigrants contribute billions of dollars in federal taxes each year, and their income taxes and payroll tax dollars are keeping Social Security and Medicare solvent showing the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the immigration debate in the U.S. Lifting the cap on taxes for the wealthy would put Social Security on such a firm financial footing that it would be a major contribution to doubling Social Security payments in order to address the retirement security crisis.
- Second, put in place more a progressive income tax, especially on the wealthiest.
- In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty recommends top marginal income tax rates of 80 percent on income above $500,000 and 50 or 60 percent on income above about $200,000 for the United States in order to combat inequality and fully fund and revitalize the public sector.
- In fact, throughout the 1950s and until 1962, the top marginal tax rate was over 90 percent and remained over 70 percent until 1980. This was a period of shared prosperity where wages kept pace with increases in productivity.
- The high top marginal rates incentivized top management to reinvest earnings in their companies instead of bleeding them dry with excessive executive compensation, as we have seen over the last 40 years with the decline of US manufacturing.
- Third, institute a wealth tax, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, proposed taxing wealth in excess of $50 million at 2 percent per year and wealth above $1 billion at an additional 1 percent tax. This would affect only seventy-five thousand households and would raise some $2.8 trillion over a decade.
- Fourth, increase the inheritance tax, reversing the trend of reducing such taxes. Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a top rate of 77 percent on estates worth more than $1 billion, and rates of at least 45 percent on estates valued above $3.5 million. This would raise up to $315 billion over a decade and only impact the wealthiest, not the ability of people to pass down their home to their children or small businesses or family farms.
- Fifth, tax wealth at the same rates we tax work. Capital gains — profits from the sale of stocks, bonds, and other assets — are taxed at much lower rates than income from work is taxed. The current top federal rate for this tax is 20 percent, compared with the top income tax rate of 37 percent. This reform would impact the very wealthy. For households making over $10 million, capital gains account for 46.4 percent of income. For households making less than $100,000, capital gains account for a tiny 0.7 percent of the income.
- Sixth, put in place a progressive carbon tax as a tool to combat the climate crisis. A progressive carbon tax taxes carbon at its source. Some of its proceeds are returned to individuals and households as rebates and other proceeds fund the transition to clean renewable energy.
PODCAST In the middle of the last century, there was a large and secure working class. Then, changes to the tax structure distributed more and more of the wealth to the richest and hollowed out the middle class. Now, levels of inequality in the United States are unsustainable as the top one-tenth of one percent (0.1%) has wealth equal to the bottom 80%. Momentum is growing to make the tax system more fair at both the state and federal levels. We speak with Sam Pizzigati about the history of taxes and what policies are currently being proposed.
Listen here: Subscribe to our show on iTunes, SoundCloud, MixCloud or Stitcher. By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. | ,
Subscribe to Clearing the FOG on Patreon and receive our bonus show, Thinking it Through, plus Clearing the FOG totes, water bottles and T shirts. Visit Patreon.com/ClearingtheFOG. And visit the new Popular Resistance Podcast Network at www.PopularResistance.org/prpn/
Guest: Sam Pizzigati is a veteran labor journalist and Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow who co-edits Inequality.org, the Institute’s weekly newsletter on our great divides. He also contributes a regular column to OtherWords, the IPS national nonprofit editorial service. Sam, now retired from the labor movement, spent two decades directing the publishing program at America’s largest union, the 2.8-million-member National Education Association, and before that edited the national publications of three other U.S. trade unions. Sam’s own writing has revolved around economic inequality since the early 1990s. His op-eds on income and wealth concentration have appeared in periodicals all around the world, from the New York Times to Le Monde Diplomatique. Sam has authored four books and co-edited two others. His 2004 book, Greed and Good: Understanding the Inequality that Limits Our Lives, won an “outstanding title” honor from the American Library Association’s book review journal. His 2012 title, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970, explores how average Americans ended the nation’s original Gilded Age. Sam’s most recent book, The Case for a Maximum Wage,
One area where the two parties of the millionaires and billionaires put in place policies that favor the rich are tax laws. Tax policy has favored the wealthy under both parties, but the Trump-administration has brought this tax corruption to new levels. We need to transform tax policy to build the working class base of the economy, shrink the wealth divide, and confront the climate crisis. An honest analysis of the tax code calls out in stark detail the extreme injustice of the economy in the United States.
The tax system favors the wealthy as low- and middle-income people are hit the hardest while big business and high-income people are subsidized. The most regressive tax of all is the FICA payroll tax at 15.3 percent for Social Security and Medicare. 15.3 percent includes the employer match. But employers include the tax in their labor budgets and it limits what they can pay their workers. The 12.4 percent Social Security share of FICA is outright regressive because it is capped for high-income earners at $128,400 in 2018.
The Trump Tax Favors the Wealthy At The Expense of the Working Class
On December 19, 2017, the Trump Tax Bill passed Congress. It was a gift for big business and the wealthy. It cut tax rates for corporations to 21 percent from 35 percent. It created a new 20 percent deduction for pass-through businesses that is favorable to commercial real estate companies like the Trumps’. It lowered individual tax rates for the wealthy in the top bracket to 37 percent from 39.6. It also helped the super rich by exempting larger inheritances from the estate tax, doubling the thresholds to $11 million for individuals and $22 million for married couples.
The benefits of the Trump law go to the most wealthy people in the United States. The Tax Policy Center reported that the top 0.1 percent would receive an average tax benefit of $193,380 in 2018. And over half of the bill’s total benefits would go to the top 10 percent of earners. The Joint Committee on Taxation, the official congressional scorekeeper, estimates that by 2027, every income group making less than $75,000 would see a net tax increase. JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the country, bragged to its investors that the Trump tax cuts increased its bottom line by $3.7 billion.
People know the Trump Tax was for the rich and not them, nearly two-thirds favor its outright repeal.
The Trump tax bill is the opposite direction the country needs to go at a time of record wealth divides when three people have the wealth of half the population. The Trump tax law made inequality worse as it resulted in a record amount being spent to buy back stock — more than $1 trillion — artificially raising stock prices and increasing top management pay and investment earnings.
Demonstrators against the Republican tax reform bill hold a “Peoples Filibuster to Stop Tax Cuts for Billionaires,” protest rally outside the US Capitol on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, November 30, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
Tax Cuts for the Rich Hurt the Economy for Working People
The Trump tax bill has once again demonstrated the failure of supply-side tax cuts for the rich to trickle down to the rest of us as expanded production, more jobs, and higher wages. This trickle-down theory in practice just makes the rich richer. Given capitalism’s endemic tendency to overproduction, more money for the rich is not invested in the real economy of production but in financial maneuvers like stock buy-backs, which simply rearrange and concentrate who owns the real productive assets of the economy. It would be more productive and efficient to tax the rich and invest that money through the public sector in needed programs, like improved Medicare for All, and needed infrastructure and production, like mass transit and clean energy systems.
Nearly 200 Occupy Fort Lauderdale protesters march in the heavy rain in downtown Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011. Having started in New York, Occupy Wall Streets demonstrations now take place all across the United States, as protesters speak out against corporate greed and the gap between the rich and the poor. (AP Photo/J Pat Carter)
Growing Economic Inequality
The income gap between the rich and everyone else has been growing markedly, by every major statistical measure, for more than 40 years. As of 2017, the richest 0.1 percent take in 188 times as much income as the bottom 90 percent. Between 1979 and 2007, paycheck income for those in the richest 1 percent and 0.1 percent exploded. Meanwhile, the bottom 90 percent of earners have seen little change in their average income, with just a 22 percent increase from 1979 to 2017. An estimated 43.5 percent of the U.S. population, 140 million people, are either poor or low-income, according the the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Supplemental Poverty Measure, which is a far more realistic measure of actual living costs compared to the old Official Poverty Line, which simply multiplies the minimum food diet by three.
As bad as income inequality is, wealth inequality is even more pronounced. The wealthiest 5 percent own two-thirds of the nation’s wealth: the top 10 percent owns nearly 80 percent of the nation’s wealth. Over the past three decades, the most affluent U.S. families have added dramatically to their net worth, while those on the bottom have dipped into “negative wealth,” i.e., their debts exceed the value of their assets.
When looked at through a racial lens, the situation is even worse. The median black family, with just over $3,500 net wealth, owns just 2 percent of the net wealth of the median white family at nearly $147,000. The proportion of black families with zero or negative wealth rose by 8.5 percent to 37 percent between 1983 and 2016. The median white family has 41 times more wealth than the median black family and 22 times more wealth than the median Latino family. The U.S. poverty rate for white men is 7.0 percent, while it is 21.4 percent for black women, 18.7 percent for Latinas, and 22.8 percent for Native American women. The low wealth and high poverty in communities of color are not only due to current policy, but the enduring impacts of slavery and racial discrimination and exclusion in the United States since its founding. Major investments and empowerment of communities of color are essential to create economic and racial justice.
The Tax System Should Reduce Inequality
We need a tax plan that takes the opposite approach of the Trump tax plan, and the Obama-era tax plan that preceded it. A February 2019 poll, found that 76 percent of registered voters want the wealthiest Americans to pay more. Rather than failing to build the economy by reducing taxes on the wealthy, we need to actually build the economy by creating a strong foundation of purchasing power in the working class by ending poverty and economic insecurity.
First, we need to end the regressive payroll tax by lifting the $128,400 cap on Social Security taxes. Currently, undocumented immigrants contribute billions of dollars in federal taxes each year, and their income taxes and payroll tax dollars are keeping Social Security and Medicare solvent showing the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the immigration debate in the U.S. Lifting the cap on taxes for the wealthy would put Social Security on such a firm financial footing that it would be a major contribution to doubling Social Security payments in order to address the retirement security crisis.
Second, put in place more a progressive income tax, especially on the wealthiest. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty recommends top marginal income tax rates of 80 percent on income above $500,000 and 50 or 60 percent on income above about $200,000 for the United States in order to combat inequality and fully fund and revitalize the public sector. In fact, throughout the 1950s and until 1962, the top marginal tax rate was over 90 percent and remained over 70 percent until 1980. This was a period of shared prosperity where wages kept pace with increases in productivity. The high top marginal rates incentivized top management to reinvest earnings in their companies instead of bleeding them dry with excessive executive compensation, as we have seen over the last 40 years with the decline of US manufacturing.
Third, institute a wealth tax, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, proposed taxing wealth in excess of $50 million at 2 percent per year and wealth above $1 billion at an additional 1 percent tax. This would affect only seventy-five thousand households and would raise some $2.8 trillion over a decade.
Fourth, increase the inheritance tax, reversing the trend of reducing such taxes. Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a top rate of 77 percent on estates worth more than $1 billion, and rates of at least 45 percent on estates valued above $3.5 million. This would raise up to $315 billion over a decade and only impact the wealthiest, not the ability of people to pass down their home to their children or small businesses or family farms.
Fifth, tax wealth at the same rates we tax work. Capital gains — profits from the sale of stocks, bonds, and other assets — are taxed at much lower rates than income from work is taxed. The current top federal rate for this tax is 20 percent, compared with the top income tax rate of 37 percent. This reform would impact the very wealthy. For households making over $10 million, capital gains account for 46.4 percent of income. For households making less than $100,000, capital gains account for a tiny 0.7 percent of the income.
Sixth, put in place a progressive carbon tax as a tool to combat the climate crisis. A progressive carbon tax taxes carbon at its source. Some of its proceeds are returned to individuals and households as rebates and other proceeds fund the transition to clean renewable energy.
More than 100 New Yorkers gathered in Brooklyn on Feb 26, 2019. Erik McGregor.
Funding a Green New Deal
More progressive and ecological taxation is essential to fund the ecosocialist Green New Deal for climate and economic security. The goals are to transition to 100 percent Green Energy by 2030 while ending the insecurity of the economy with an Economic Bill of Rights that guarantees to all living-wage jobs, an income above poverty, decent housing, comprehensive health care, and lifelong public education from pre-K through college.
The Green New Deal can close racial income and wealth gaps by empowering racially-oppressed communities through community control of Green New Deal programs so these communities are no longer subject to discrimination and exploitation by outside employers, landlords, real estate agents, and other gatekeepers. In addition, HR 40 for a Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans should be enacted to find the best way to create individual and collective wealth to compensate for hundreds of years of unpaid and underpaid labor.
In addition to a more progressive tax system, we need to get our spending priorities straight. The U.S. military budget is greater than those of the next 10 largest military powers combined and eight of them are US allies. The military budget takes more than 60 percent of federal discretionary spending totaling$989 billion annually. $21 trillion of Pentagon financial transactions between 1998 and 2015 cannot be traced, documented, or explained.
The U.S. can cut its military budget by 75 percent and still spend more on the military than any other nation. We can invest the resulting peace dividend in a Global Green New Deal to meet basic needs like clean water and preventive health care around the world as well as to help developing countries leap over the fossil fuel age into the solar age. By acting as the world’s humanitarian superpower instead of its global military occupation force, we can make friends instead of enemies. A Global Green New Deal will build a sustainable peace where the world’s nations work cooperatively to solve our common problems of the climate and poverty.
Amazon, run by Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, paid no federal taxes on $11.2 billion in profits in 2018. In comparison, undocumented people contribute some $11 billion in taxes every year. The third richest man in the world, Warren Buffett, admits he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. These are two examples of many that demonstrate that transformation of the US tax system is urgently needed.
Howie Hawkins is retired Teamster living in Syracuse, New York. The first U.S. candidate to campaign for a Green New Deal while running for New York governor in 2010, he recently formed an exploratory committee to run for the Green Party nomination for president in 2020.
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. | , PODCAST
In the middle of the last century, there was a large and secure working class. Then, changes to the tax structure distributed more and more of the wealth to the richest and hollowed out the middle class. Now, levels of inequality in the United States are unsustainable as the top one-tenth of one percent (0.1%) has wealth equal to the bottom 80%. Momentum is growing to make the tax system more fair at both the state and federal levels. We speak with Sam Pizzigati about the history of taxes and what policies are currently being proposed.
Listen here: Subscribe to our show on iTunes, SoundCloud, MixCloud or Stitcher.
Subscribe to Clearing the FOG on Patreon and receive our bonus show, Thinking it Through, plus Clearing the FOG totes, water bottles and T shirts. Visit Patreon.com/ClearingtheFOG. And visit the new Popular Resistance Podcast Network at www.PopularResistance.org/prpn/
Guest: Sam Pizzigati is a veteran labor journalist and Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow who co-edits Inequality.org, the Institute’s weekly newsletter on our great divides. He also contributes a regular column to OtherWords, the IPS national nonprofit editorial service. Sam, now retired from the labor movement, spent two decades directing the publishing program at America’s largest union, the 2.8-million-member National Education Association, and before that edited the national publications of three other U.S. trade unions. Sam’s own writing has revolved around economic inequality since the early 1990s. His op-eds on income and wealth concentration have appeared in periodicals all around the world, from the New York Times to Le Monde Diplomatique. Sam has authored four books and co-edited two others. His 2004 book, Greed and Good: Understanding the Inequality that Limits Our Lives, won an “outstanding title” honor from the American Library Association’s book review journal. His 2012 title, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970, explores how average Americans ended the nation’s original Gilded Age. Sam’s most recent book, The Case for a Maximum Wage,
The United States is commonly thought of as a low-tax country. But workers effectively pay some of the highest taxes in the developed world — without getting a decent welfare state in return.
The apparent reason these mandated premiums are incompatible with the OECD’s Taxing Wages model is that they are open-ended payments: employers and employees have to buy private insurance regardless of its cost. If the mandated premiums were set by law as a fixed sum per worker or percentage of payroll as in other countries, then they could be included in the OECD’s figures.
Estimating The US Compulsory Payment Rate
If you are going to count employer-side payroll taxes and employer premium contributions towards the labor tax burden, then you also need to count those things as worker pay. The following graph mirrors the one above except it shows what the average wage really is when you count all of the employer’s labor costs, not just the cash it pays to employees.
Finally, we can divide each labor tax concept by each pay concept to show the difference between what we often think of as the “employee tax rate” and the actual “compulsory payment rate” (share of labor compensation going to tax and NTCPs).
The comprehensive measure shows that a married couple with two kids that makes the average wage pays over 43 percent of their income in compulsory payments of one sort or another. Health premiums are 26.4 of the 43.2 points.
Finally, we can go back to the OECD NTCP data and compare the US to other developed countries. When we do that, we find that only the Netherlands — with its compulsory private health insurance and compulsory private pension — has a higher labor tax burden by this measure.
If you want to know what it is like to pay income taxes like they do in Europe, then looking closely at your pay stub would be a good start. We don’t pay as many formal taxes as they do, but when you bring in payments we are compelled to pay and that are deducted straight out of our paychecks just like taxes are, it really does not look that much different, at least as far as labor taxes are concerned.
Ultimately, this is a long exercise in pointing out the obvious: American workers already pay more than enough money to provide good health care to everyone in the country. It’s just that they pay it into a private insurance system that wastes large portions of it on rents and administrative redundancy. As the Mercatus Center noted last year, by implementing a Medicare for All system, the US could insure 30 million more people, provide dental, vision, and hearing coverage to everyone, and virtually eliminate out-of-pocket expenses, all while saving $2 trillion over the first decade of implementation.
“The U.S. Treasury reported that corporations paid $92 billion less in federal taxes in 2018 than they did in 2017, a 31 percent drop off.” (Photo: Zhu/flickr/cc)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Bernie Sanders, castigator of the one percent, is a millionaire now. So are Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Big whoop. There’s a crucial difference between these candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination and the super wealthy – particularly 60 gigantic, massively profitable U.S. corporations. The candidates faithfully pay federal taxes. The corporations don’t.
That’s right. Sixty profitable corporations paid no federal taxes in 2018, twice the number that typically paid nothing in the years before the 2017 tax breaks took effect. In fact, it’s worse than that. Fifty-seven of these corporations demanded rebates from the government – which means taxpayers like you and me paid them to exist. These are corporations on the dole. They claim to hate socialism if it means Medicare for All, but they sure as hell love socialism when it’s welfare for them.
Sanders, Harris, Warren and other candidates seeking the Democratic nomination paid their taxes because they are patriots. Most working Americans pay a fair share to support their country. True citizens pay so that their nation can thrive. They pay so that the United States can afford to educate its citizens, pave its roads, operate its courts, care for its vulnerable and sustain its military. They pay because they understand they have a duty to the country that nurtured them, that protects them and that they love.
But too many U.S. corporations, which the U.S. Supreme Court has anointed with human rights, refuse to acknowledge their concomitant obligations. Corporations and the super wealthy pushed hard for the tax breaks Republicans bestowed on them in 2017. Fat cats paid untold tens of millions to dark money groups that served as cash cows for GOP candidates who, once elected, shepherded those tax breaks.
Corporate front groups and GOP apologists such as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin insisted the tax cuts would pay for themselves. Mnuchin went even further, contendingthe cuts would reduce the deficit by $1 trillion. Everything would be hunky-dory.
It was a lie then. And now the deceit is exposed for the grotesquerie it was. The U.S. Treasury reported that corporations paid $92 billion less in federal taxes in 2018 than they did in 2017, a 31 percent drop off.
To put that in perspective, the decline is the second largest since 1934, which was during the Great Depression. The only larger swoon was 55 percent at the outset of the Great Recession from 2008 to 2009.
Bad things happen when corporations shirk their obligations. One is that workers end up bearing more of the cost. Last year, individual taxpayers provided more than half of federal income tax revenue and corporations contributed only 7 percent. Just four years ago, corporations accounted for 11 percent and individual taxpayers 47 percent.
Another ill effect is that government debt balloons. The U.S. Treasury Department reported that the deficit rose $113 billion or 17 percent in the first year of the tax cuts, the largest one-year increase since 2009, which was during the worst of the Great Recession. That black hole is projected to occur every year the tax cuts remain in effect.
Republicans take those deficit figures – deficits they created by cutting taxes – and use them to demand offsetting spending cuts – that is cuts to Social Security, cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, cuts to food stamps and school lunch programs, cuts to programs that are precious to workers and the poor.
The deficits grow like this: Amazon, the online marketplace, made nearly $11 billion last year and instead of paying the current, low 21 percent corporate tax rate on that income, it demanded that taxpayers give it $129 million. Which they did. It wasn’t a rebate since Amazon paid no taxes. It was a big fat, gift withdrawn involuntarily from workers’ pockets, wrapped in a fuzzy, flocked Amazon smiley bag, and deposited directly into corporate coffers. This is perverse wealth transfer, from the poor and middle class to the rich and corporations.
And taxpayers didn’t even get Amazon Prime in exchange.
Of the 60 profitable corporations that paid no taxes, 57 got payments like this from workers. Amazon’s wasn’t even the largest. Ten companies took more, including Duke Energy, which set an infamous record for itself by grubbing the most – $647 million. On about $76 billion in pretax income, the 57 forced taxpayers to give them $4.3 billion.
If, instead of exploiting every potential loophole and dodging every conceivable requirement, these corporations had paid their taxes at the new, low 21 percent rate, the United States would have received $16.4 billion in revenue from them.
That’s money the country needs.
And it’s not like Amazon and its fellow corporate welfare recipients don’t deliver their goods on the roads that workers’ tax dollars construct, or snap up software engineers educated in public schools that workers’ tax dollars build, or argue their patent cases in courts that workers’ tax dollars maintain.
Americans overwhelmingly support repairing the nation’s crumbling roads, bridges, airports and water lines, using U.S.-made products and union workers. In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s infrastructure a D grade and estimated that the United States must spend $4.5 trillion by 2025 to upgrade the structures on which American commerce depends.
President Donald Trump and majorities in Congress are all for infrastructure improvements too. But it never happens. And the reason is money. There is no money to do it when so many U.S. corporations use this infrastructure to make boatloads of money, pay no taxes and demand the government give them workers’ tax dollars.
Workers use those roads and bridges and pipelines too. But we pay. Yeah, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren made a lot of money by writing and selling books in the past couple of years. In 2018, Sanders and his wife, Jane, reported to the IRS an adjusted gross income of $561,293, which included $393,000 from selling books. They gave $19,000 to charities and paid a federal tax rate of 26 percent – significantly higher than the 21 percent rate charged to corporations, which don’t pay it anyway. Bernie and Jane gave the federal government $145,840.
Other Democrats seeking the party’s nomination for president released tax returns showing they paid their fair share as well. They include Kamala Harris who reported earnings of about $1.9 million and paid at an effective tax rate of 37 percent last year. Sen. Warren, with an adjusted gross income of $846,394, paid at a rate of 27 percent. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who had the lowest adjusted gross income of the Democrats who have released tax forms, $202,912, also, logically, paid the lowest rate, 15 percent.
Each of them paid more money and at a higher rate than billionaire Amazon.
Not all wealthy people believe it’s wise to sustain a system that does not require the 1 percent and profitable corporations to pay their fair share. A group of them, the Patriotic Millionaires as they call themselves, met in Washington, D.C., this week to discuss better ways to assess taxes and what will happen to this country if nothing changes.
They believe the government should mandate tax payments from the rich and corporations to ensure survival of the very institutions and values that helped the one percent accrue millions and billions.
The crucial difference between you and Amazon is that you paid your fair share, and Amazon took your tax dollars. So, no, the roads and bridges won’t get fixed this year either.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
