The Crazy & The Intentional Covers Up The Looting
This is a decades-old scheme—and most people do not support the robbery.
Why You Might Want To Read This: The political crazy, combined with lying, obsessions about age and misdirection, obscures the big story taking place every day: the obscenely wealthy are shredding our society.
I’m as guilty as anyone. If you have even a sliver of a hold on reality, how can one not scream, “WTF, the attorney general of the U.S. has no idea what habeas corpus means” or fill in the blank with virtually any of the fools who right now have their hands on the wheels of multi-billion public agencies.
But, it is a distraction. I don’t mean “inconsequential” because stupidity or ignorance isn’t the same as being harmless and a lot of the intentions of those in power are aimed at hurting plenty of people.
I mean that the real story, which has endured no matter what party is running the show, is the siphoning of the wealth created by working people into the hands of a few. To be sure, there are differences between the starting and end points of how the looting takes place—it’s more obvious, and more obscene, in the hands of people like Lindsey Graham, who, in a world where brazen lies no longer register even a blip, declares that extending the Trump tax cuts won’t cost anything. Zero! Ponies for everyone!
But, there have always been guardrails protecting the supremely wealthy. If you ushered to the door all the aged elected officials—because age seems to be the hot topic these days used by folks angling for their own power—a set of economic assumptions are deeply embedded in the DNA of the political discourse that are cancerous and aren’t going away:
Business people are geniuses
Small business owners should be revered, just shy of Buddha status
Social Security is broke
We have a national debt crisis
All of the above is utter nonsense. And all of the above are the oil that smooths the machinery to execute the unadulterated robbery of the Treasury.
Let’s look at the circa 2025 looting-in-process via a series of charts outlining what’s on the table right now. Courtesy of the wonderful people at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which took numbers generated by Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), we know that:
The JCT analysis makes clear that the House tax plan would be regressive, meaning it would offer larger tax cuts as a share of income to high-income taxpayers than to either middle-class or working-class families. It also makes clear that most of the tax cuts would go to families with above-average incomes.
None of this surprises my readers. It’s still worth understanding some of the details in pretty pictures.
[Note: the numbers here are as of May 16th so given the utter chaos among the Republicans the numbers likely shifted in the monstrosity voted out on May 22nd but the overall theme is the same]
Who gets to pocket the cash?
This is the same movie we’ve seen over and over again since the Reagan era tax cuts, which many Democrats supported (look up the Southern “boll weevils”).
I want to draw your attention to the bottom third band in the column on the far right, the one that allocates a significant chunk of the higher-income tax cuts to those with an average income of $221,000.
And this is where tax policy intersects with bad politics and bad ideology.
You may recall that during Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, he promised not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000.
Which, back then, I thought was supremely, astonishingly dumb but was a reflection of Biden’s repeated mantra, and ideological belief, a la “God bless if you made a billion dollars, that’s America”. I talked about how foolish that tax view is, among other places, in my May 2020 podcast here because every billionaire is just a story of some combination of worker exploitation (see: Phil Knight), monopoly (see: Bill Gates) or financial scam (see: Steve Cohen, the “hey, I paid a multi-billion fine to stay out of jail for corruption-insider trading” owner of the Mets). Billionaires only exist because of greed, corruption, out-of-control legal bribery (read: campaign contributions) and deeply embedded ideas that fuel historic inequality.
Why would we think it’s good public policy to tell people making say $300,000-per-year that they shouldn’t pay more? How does that resemble community or fairness to most hard-working Americans?
But, it is tax policy that is a reflection of a short-sited political decision—not a smart economic decision—to throw a bone to the kind of relatively affluent voter who votes Democratic. I mean, folks who are socially liberal but are a bit less progressive on economics, and, I’d venture to guess, in their heart of hearts, aren’t solidly pro-union people. “Don’t worry, you of the $350,000 income, vote for me but I won’t raise your taxes” was pretty much the dog-whistle.
Which just feeds into a person making south of $100,000 and in the low- to mid- five figures, who can’t pay the bills and is in debt, thinking: WTF? Why am I paying a shit-ton in taxes in relative terms, and that $300K person is gliding by with an easier tax burden?
It makes no sense on the politics nor on the economics. But, it does partly explain why the Democratic Party finds itself in a bind of its own making, having very little to do with the Mad Hatter in the White House.
AND, here’s the positive news: The looting doesn’t even make sense to the majority of people. Unfortunately, though accurately, a lot of people think the game is rigged on taxes no matter who’s running the show.
Evidence? I hesitate to use polling to prove a point because people can be swayed quickly based on misinformation or some jolt in the news. That said, I thought this recent Gallup poll was instructive.
And its related question:
And the next related question:
My conclusion: taking away personalities and the knee-jerk affiliation with a political party, there is a broad feeling that rich people and corporations don’t pay enough, and that poorer folks pay too much. For sure, when people answer a poll question like the above, they may answer in a way that conveys “I’m not a greedy fuck and I care for everyone else” but they may act differently.
But, it’s not hard to see that there is still at least a broadly-held recognition that the game is fixed for the very wealthy and corporations.
I don’t really care how old a politician is (ok, within reason—Dianne Feinstein’s dementia went too far). We should care whether they stand for stopping the brazen looting of the public.
