Let This Be the Last Time in History the Top 1% Can Boast Unprecedented Wealth
We don’t have to imagine a world without poverty; it’s within our means to eradicate. All we need is the political will.
Ah, to be a rich American. What a life it must be.
As we see the economy steadily improve and average Americans’ wages increase, new data from the Federal Reserve this week shows the wealth of the morbidly rich is outpacing gains.
The end of the fiscal fourth quarter last year revealed that the top 1% of Americans are the richest they’ve ever been in history.
How rich exactly?
$5.5 trillion in wealth, a $30 trillion increase in the past four years — up 88% since the start of the pandemic.
Earlier this month, in his State of the Union speech, President Joe Biden reiterated his promise to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations that today pay next to nothing — and in some cases, actually nothing — in taxes, proclaiming:
I’m a capitalist. You want to make a million, or millions of bucks? That’s great. Just pay your fair share in taxes.
The president also encouraged Congress to approve limiting business income deductions for executive pay to $1 million.
Reuters reported:
Current law prohibits deductions on compensation for chief executive officers, chief financial officers and other key positions. White House officials said the [president’s] new proposal would cover all employees paid more than $1 million, and raise more than $250 billion in new corporate tax revenue over 10 years.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) Biden signed into law two years ago requires companies reporting more than $1 billion in profits to pay a 15% minimum corporate tax rate, and wealthy shareholders to pay a 1% tax on stock buybacks. The bill also requires Americans making over $400,000 to pay a little more in taxes.
Change is slow, though. We can’t reverse four decades of neo-liberal “trickle-down” economic policies in just two years.
Biden’s promise is reinvigorating a call for the “Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act,” sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, and Rep. Brendan Boyle, which would impose a two-cent tax on every dollar over $50 million.
In a press release, Sen. Warren explained:
As President Biden says: no one thinks it’s fair that Jeff Bezos gets enough tax loopholes that he pays at a lower rate than a public school teacher. All my bill is asking is that when you make it big, bigger than $50 million dollars, then on that next dollar, you pitch in two cents, so everyone else can have a chance.
Surely the richest people in all of history can afford to chip in a measly two cents on every dollar after $50 million, right?
Thom Hartmann, political commentator and author of The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness, explained in a recent piece titled “Why the Corporate Tax Bracket Should Go Back to 52%”:
Taxes are used to incentivize behaviors that are good for the nation and discourage behaviors that are destructive to the nation.
This is where Reaganomics has not only screwed average American working people but screwed American business — particularly small and medium-sized businesses — as well.
While America is still a wellspring of innovation, we could be doing so very much better. For example, just the mostly tech companies listed in the S&P 500 bought back $882 billion of their own shares in 2021 and over $1 trillion in 2022. And that’s nearly two trillion dollars spilling out of just one or two market sectors!
Two trillion dollars is four times the cost to eliminate all poverty in the United States.
We don’t have to imagine a world without poverty; it’s within our means to eradicate. All we need is the political will. A world in which poverty exists at the same time the insanely wealthy are the richest they have ever been, boasting more wealth than they need or can possibly spend in a single lifetime, is not only immoral--it’s inhumane, inhuman, even.
The Biden administration and most Democratic lawmakers are demonstrating their political will to at least address this.
But…(here it comes)…republicans have, naturally, proposed new tax cuts threatening to add at least $21 billion to the federal debt over the next decade by doing the following:
— Reinstating corporate tax breaks on interest spending, equipment, and research.
— Chiping away at the Inflation Reduction Act by limiting electric vehicle tax credits, preventing tax payers from implementing those credits toward used vehicles, canceling tax credits incentivizing clean energy production and investment, and repealing a chemical waste site tax.
— Eliminating green energy tax credits intended to defray $216 billion of the $240 billion tax cuts’ cost.
— Raising the Social Security retirement age from 67 to 69.
— Further chiping away at Medicare by turning it into a voucher program.
— Increasing deductions for families making under $400,000 over the next two years.
— Eliminating requiring taxpayers to report Venmo or similar transactions over $600.
— Implementing a “deduction bonus” for married couples filing jointly for the standard deduction, for which they would receive $4,000 for two years.
— Increasing the method by which businesses claim depreciation deductions through raising the bar to a permanent $2.5 million from the current $1 million stipulated in the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” (TCJA) former president Trump signed into law in 2017.
— Permanently extending corporate tax breaks the TCJA grants currently through 2025, something the Tax Policy Center reported would cost the country around $500 billion.
— Expanding tax benefits for small start-up businesses to “S Corporations,” eliminating some so-called “red tape” small businesses face pertaining to contract workers.
Ways and Means Committee ranking member Rep. Richard E. Neal explained:
It’s Republican clockwork. Not even a week after their manufactured default crisis and it is back to tax cuts for the wealthy and well-connected. This stoops to a new low even for them: retroactive corporate tax cuts, next-to-nothing for the most vulnerable children and families, and sneaking in favors for Big Oil. Make no mistake about it, they are laying the groundwork for even bigger cuts in 2025, and the only way they will ever achieve a balanced budget is by sticking seniors and working families with the bill.
The past 20 years, CEOs have boasted an average increase 350 times more than their employees.
According to a 2021 Treasury Department watchdog report, the IRS failed to collect more than $38.5 billion from taxpayers earning over $200,000 a year, and more than $2.4 billion from those with incomes over $1.5 million. Harvard University research shows those responsible for 70 percent of that tax gap are the richest one percent of income earners.
The shift is occurring.
Once more Americans realize the facts behind how much they’re being used by the oligarchs and their republican (and some Democratic) shills in Congress, we’ll see more momentum.
But there is an entire corporate media dedicated to maintaining the status quo.
The corporations that own the big American media conglomerates thrive on horse race because it’s how they generate ratings. Since those corporations are owned and run by people (corporations themselves are not people, after all, despite what the almighty US Supreme Court argued), interested in staying rich, their personal fortunes depend on this.
This is why we rarely hear on television and radio anything about organized labor, or from people with serious criticisms of the rigged tax code or the republican tax cuts from which the economic royalists maintain their hegemony.
The republican party has nothing — literally nothing — to offer average working class Americans anything other than umbrage and outrage intended to divide people along class, racial, and economic lines. Because when we are fighting amongst ourselves over how much more “those people,” those “takers,” have than we might have, we’re not paying attention to how much the wealthy tax cheats continue to rip us off, compliments of the GOP.