Barbara's Blog: A Season for Scrooge: Congress Votes More Tax Cuts for the Rich, Service Cuts for Everyone Else

December 12, 2005

A Season for Scrooge: Congress Votes More Tax Cuts for the Rich, Service Cuts for Everyone Else

Somehow I had imagined that the holiday spirit would stay the claw-like hand of greed. But this week Congress voted to extend tax cuts for the rich, which are to be partially offset by cuts in Medicaid, food stamps, and student loans. That’s right: In a stunning inversion of Judaeo-Christian, not to mention Muslim and Buddhist, ethics, Congress is once again proposing to take from the poor and give to the rich.

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) offered a holiday-themed protest. Holding up two stockings – one labeled “rich” and one labeled “poor” – he transferred “presents” such as programs for the poor, elderly and disabled from the “poor” sock to the “rich” one. “What’s left for the poor people?” he asked. “Look at that, a lump of coal. The poor people better save that lump of coal because there’s nothing in here for their heating bills.”

The Republicans, in full Scrooge mode, shrugged off McDermott and other outraged Democrats. Making the Democrats sound like a bunch of well-programmed androids, Representative Bill Thomas (R-Calif) remarked: “They are required to attack any bill that allows Americans to hold on to their own hard-earned money.”

Let’s give Rep. Thomas’s rejoinder a closer examination than it perhaps deserves. Note first the ingenious folding of the rich into the general category of Americans. Yes, they are Americans, the rich people in question, but this empty observation evades the fact that America is now the most class-polarized of the industrial societies. In economic terms, “Americans” means almost as little as “animals” does in zoology– we are divided into what are financially almost different species, from the 300 or so billionaires at the top to the shivering homeless at the bottom.

Next consider the duplicitous phrase “hard-earned.” In fact, the extended tax cuts are not on the kind of earnings that involve work of any kind; they’re cuts in taxes on dividends and capital gains. This is money made by money, not by sweat. Most Americans make most of their money by exerting their brains and muscles hour after hour each day. Heiresses, like for example Alice Walton (daughter of Wal-Mart’s Sam Walton), just have to wait around for the dividends to come pouring in. It’s the latter kind of “earnings” that the tax cuts will protect.

I can imagine Rep. Thomas’s response. Maybe Alice doesn’t have to work, but her father did, and if he chose to leave her enough money for a lifestyle centered on horse-raising and art collecting – well, that was his decision. All wealth is a frozen, crystalline, form of work.

But I would counter with the question: Whose work? Sam Walton’s $90 billion legacy was not just the product of that genial store-owner’s frenetic empire building, but of the daily toil, spread over years, of millions of low-wage Wal-Mart workers (or “associates” as they’re politely termed), not to mention all the workers in the third world factories that supply the Wal-Mart chain. Great fortunes for the few are the flip side of low-wages for the many. If all the workers who made the store chain huge and profitable had been paid a living wage, the Walton wealth would be far smaller than it is. Heck, Alice might have had to go out and get a job.

The Democrats have hardly been reliable champions of the poor – it was Bill Clinton, after all, who signed the savage welfare “reform” bill of 1996. But they have in some dim way understood that someone – i.e., government – has to redress the cruel inequities of the private labor market. The old Democratic idea, which Bush’s upwardly redistributive tax policies have pretty much killed, was that you tolerate unlivable wages while providing government programs – like Medicaid and food stamps – for those who must try to live on them.

You could see this as typical Democratic mushy-minded compassion for the poor, or you could see it as an indirect subsidy to the companies that employ them. Let Wal-Mart and its ilk try to do business in a world without Medicaid and food stamps: The “associates” will be fainting at their cash registers and calling in sick with illnesses that should have been treated months ago. If you cut student loans and public education, companies are going to have a hard time finding managers or employees who can read a product label.

It’s not too late to stop this round of tax cuts for the rich and service cuts for the poor. The senate hasn’t voted on them yet, so, in the true spirit of the holidays, why not contact your senators now?

December 12, 2005 in Current Affairs | Permalink

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December 12, 2005

A Season for Scrooge: Congress Votes More Tax Cuts for the Rich, Service Cuts for Everyone Else

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