Find it here: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010083210/tax-cuts-are-theft-amplification#comment-13011
--Kim
an economy for all
Tax Cuts Are Theft: An Amplification
By Sara Robinson
August 10, 2010 - 4:21pm ET
Dave Johnson's post on the broken contract that's allowed private interests to siphon off our public wealth for the past 30 years is incredibly important. His basic argument is this:
- We, the People built our democracy and the empowerment and protections it bestows. We built the infrastructure, schools and all of the public structures, laws, courts, monetary system, etc. that enable enterprise to prosper. That prosperity is the bounty of our democracy and by contract it is supposed to be shared and reinvested. That is the contract. Our system enables some people to become wealthy but all of us are supposed to benefit from this system. Why else would We, the People have set up this system, if not for the benefit of We, the People?
It is a legacy -- the biggest one ever amassed in history, in fact -- and we do need to be thinking about it that way. What they've stolen from us and arbitraged away isn't just our own money; it's the vast accumulation of civilizational wealth that was bought with the blood, sweat, tears, endless sacrifice, earnest planning, and bold dreaming of a dozen generations of American ancestors, and then bequeathed to us to ensure our own futures. Each of those generations received it in trust from the one that came before, added its own unique contributions to it, and then passed it on as an endowment to the next. As time compounded the gift, the legacy got richer; and our sense of who was entitled to share in the bounty got broader. By the time we got our hands on it, the American legacy was, quite simply, the biggest trust fund of physical, social, and cultural capital on earth.
To understand the magnitude of the gift, consider how things work in the great aristocratic houses, both in Europe and the US. If you are a Mountbatten or a Rothschild or a Morgan or a Bush, your clan has a deep well of resources, built up over many centuries of careful investment, that ensures that you will never go without. There's always a family-owned house somewhere to stay in, an income stream to support you, and connections that will open any doors you might want to pass through. There's a villa, chalet, or yacht where you can vacation. There's a fleet of cars standing by to take you wherever you need to go. There are trusted family retainers to advise you on matters of money and law. If you need anything at all, ask around: there's undoubtedly someone in the extended clan who already has it to share, or knows how to get it for you.
It's impossible to underestimate or overstate the lifelong advantages that come with being born into a family like this. At every turn, throughout your life, you'll have every opportunity to make good -- and no excuses not to.
For the first 200 years of our existence, being born American was not unlike being born into the richest, most powerful family on the planet. By the middle of the 20th century, generations of sound investment and careful stewardship had built our collective trust fund to the point where we, too, began to believe that the shame would be on us if any member of our great household ever had to go without. If you needed decent housing or a monthly remittance to get by, we could cover that. If you needed doors opened for you in other countries, we had friends all over the world who were glad to deal with Americans. If you wanted a world-class education or the vacation of a lifetime, no problem: the family ran the best schools and universities in the world, and owned breathtaking national parks for your pleasure. If you needed to get around, we provided safe transportation networks. If you needed advice or help with a plan, there were trusted public servants on retainer. Our attitude toward the proper role of government was that, at our best, America was a big, powerful clan that had a moral duty (however imperfectly and selectively met in practice) to take care of its own, and maximize the opportunties availble to its members.
It's only when you think about our common wealth the way the world's richest families do -- as a bequest from a long line of distinguished ancestors, as a vast common resource base that provides us with extraordinary material comfort today, and as a sacred trust that we must manage and multiply on behalf of generations yet to come -- that you can really begin to understand the sheer magnitude of everything they took from us.
The thieves didn't just steal our houses, our retirement funds, our careers, or our tax money. It went far beyond that. They also stole the family jewels -- the vast infrastructure that's been built up for centuries by generations of foresighted Americans, now collapsing into uselessness. They defunded the great universities, crowded our kids into classrooms like factory farmed chickens, and are shutting down the magnificent state and national parks. And they're also stealing our future, committing us to endless debt, sucking the marrow out of our international standing, foreclosing our opportunties, making it impossible to solve looming problems, and forcing us to hand off to our children a far more meager legacy than the one we received.
They're not just cheating us. They're stealing from all those hardworking generations that sacrificed to bring us here; and all the generations still yet to come, who will be so much poorer because we let them loot us blind.
Here's the irony: the people who did this to us did it precisely because they also understand wealth in these generational terms. In many cases, the thieves were themselves from wealthy families that have operated exactly this same way for a very long time, and who have personally benefitted from the private wealth accumulated by their ancestors. In other cases, they were "self-made" billionaires who may not have wealth in their past, but were determined to capitalize a dynasty in the future.
So, if they understand this, where's the disconnect? Why couldn't they respect the public's need to manage our common wealth the same way they manage their own private wealth?
The disconnect is this: In the conservative worldview, it's right and legitimate for private families and corporations to accrue generational wealth, and build great dynasties. But it's absolutely wrong for the democratic masses to accumulate wealth that way; or to collaborate, via the government, to ensure that all of their children will have a birthright sufficient to open the doors to their dreams.
Maggie Thatcher told us outright: "There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families, and their interests." And if there's no such thing as society, then society has no right to accumulate wealth -- via taxes, investment, or any other means. Viewed this way, a conservative might even think it's a virtuous thing to defund and defraud the public out of any capital it does manage to acquire.
In the view of these economic royalists, the bottom line is this: it's OK to steal from their American brothers and sisters because they don't really believe that the family is legitimate in the first place. Being bastards -- heirs only to a social contract they insist never existed in the first place -- the rest of us were never entitled to the blessings of a birthright, any more than we're entitled to any other rights, including the right to govern ourselves.
Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future
COMMENTS
It's just plain greed
By Sanford Silver | August 11, 2010 - 10:49am GMTThe economic aristocrats consider the rest of us to be expendable resources; used as cheaply as possible for as long as doing so is profitable then tossed aside without a second thought.
The social contract, the power of government as an instrument of the individually powerless, the generational wealth that we've created, inherited, expanded and shared among those not wealthy, even shared with the wealthy making their accumulation and maintenance of wealth possible, make us less dependent on, even defiant of, the self-styled "Masters of the Universe".
We even have the audacity to force a conscience on the wealthy, to make them behave as if they actually acknowledge a social responsibility.
This they cannot stand for it might cost them a few pennies on the dollar and a small loss of the control they pathologically require.
And so the rich conducted the most insidious of class warfares, propagandizing the least discerning among us into voting against our own socio-economic interests and into supporting political agendas that the entire of human history has proven to be failures for any but the rich. Even then, in the long run, those policies failed the wealthy, as populations rose up and squashed aristocratic control.
Those so gulled have been so traumatized that even today most of them cannot admit or understand their own responsibility for the condition they find themselves and their neighbors in.
Sanford Silver
This is serious sedition
By Jay Moor | August 11, 2010 - 6:56pm GMTAgain, thank you, Sara. You are trying very hard to lend a new perspective to the American concept of "public." In this piece, you have reoriented the definition, looking at it in terms of family and clan, something fans of dynastic rule can relate to. For these ever-fearful and greedy people, security comes from autocratic rule and ruthless, centralized control of resources, used for their own aggrandizement.
That's been the general history of the world, until some very thoughtful people broke the pattern and gave us a democratic republic and the biggest self-governing club ever, redefining security in terms of what we can do cooperatively for each other. This successful club has turned out to be the most powerful aggregator of resources and, consequently, the greatest threat to the old order in its quest for those same resources. So, the history of the USA has been one of the old order -- made up of dynasties, oligarchs and their corporations -- trying to take advantage of the weaknesses in our form of governance to destroy it from within and to break the people's ability to protect its collective legacy.
Corrupting the processes of democratic governance is the current strategy aimed at breaking up the monolith of patriotic cooperation. The attack is on all fronts from the semantic to the violent. Tactics include taking over administrative functions in order to weaken our hold on the collective wealth and taking over one or both of the political parties in order to mount nasty campaigns aimed at governmental self-destruction.
I'm thinking that if we can call a simple little police action a "war on terror," it would be much nearer the truth to rename this internal effort to bring the house down by calling it what it is, "sedition" rather than just "theft." Just as the Civil War continues to be fought, Thomas Jefferson and the boys are still up against the ghost of King George and his corporations. Progressives must accurately identify the threat and mount an effective defense, on all fronts.
Not sedition at all
By Scott Amos | August 11, 2010 - 10:44pm GMTMany companies are holding off on hiring for a variety of reasons, and here is one of them: They're not optimistic about what is going to happen to taxes overall. The Bush tax cuts are set to expire in just a few months, and several changes (Obamacare, in particular) are getting to ready to nickle-and-dime both individuals and companies.
If you tax too heavily, then you put a serious damper on the creation of jobs...and income...and tax revenues. It's a little tricky to try and get the optimum rates so that you maximize both jobs and tax revenues. But demonizing the desire to keep taxes low by continously calling that thievery is just plain nuts.
Spare me
By Sara Robinson | August 12, 2010 - 3:34pm GMTthe indictments of Obamacare.
We're moving back to the US for the next couple of years, for family reasons. Getting health insurance was our biggest worry. Like most people over 45, both my husband and I have pre-existing conditions that make us basically uninsurable, and we were getting quotes for the three of us (plus son) that were upwards of $2K a month.
Enter Obamacare. We qualify for the national high-risk pool that starts next month, which caps our monthly costs at just over $900 a month. This option will save us about $12K a year, which will enable us to afford to return. And believe me: the government will be getting that back, and then some, when we start paying US income taxes again.
On a larger scale, "high taxes stall job creation" is a piece of free-market fundamentalist cant that's been totally disproven by our past 30 years of experience. In the 50s and 60s, when tax rates were at their highest, the US also saw its highest employment rates. We've been cutting taxes on the rich since the early 80s -- and jobs have been evaporating with every cut. It doesn't work. Even John McCain's campaign budget advisor, Mark Zandi, will tell you it doesn't work.
You will find no hearing for this nonsense here. This is nothing more than a quaint conservative superstition that's clung to obsessively by the True Believers, even in the face of massive evidence that it's simply not true.
It doesn't work that way
By Kim Cooper | August 16, 2010 - 10:10pm GMTScott -- You said, "If you tax too heavily, then you put a serious damper on the creation of jobs...and income...and tax revenues. "
How much tax is "too heavily"? As Sara said, when the rich were taxed at 90%, we were at our top for jobs, employment, real income, and tax revenues.
Each time the taxes are cut, the job situation gets worse. How many times does that have to happen until you admit that it doesn't work? When we raise taxes on the rich, they create jobs. "Common sense" is often wrong. Just because it sounds logical that running a government like a household budget SHOULD work, doesn't mean that it DOES work. It doesn't. Governments are different. There are logical explanations for this, it's just more complex than "common sense".
Progressive Voices
Ugly Americans
By Nunzia Rider | August 16, 2010
Take This Job and Shove It
By Daniel Gross | August 16, 2010
What the Tea Parties Really Want
By Margaret Kimberly | August 16, 2010
Five Absurd Things That Simply Can't Happen in Wartime Washington
By Tom Engelhardt | August 16, 2010
The Free Market is Anti-American
By Mark Summers | August 16, 2010
Attacking Social Security
By Paul Krugman | August 16, 2010
Countdown To Collapse: The Recovery Is Not Recovering
By Danny Schechter | August 13, 2010
Insurance Premiums Rising? Blame a CEO
By Joan McCarter | August 13, 2010
Why Bernanke Isn't Doing More to Boost the Economy
By Michael Grunwald | August 13, 2010
Paralysis at the Fed
By Paul Krugman | August 13, 2010
Popular This Week
Gibbs on the Left: Dog Bites the Man
by Robert BorosageAugust 10, 2010
Deficits And Economic Recovery
by Isaiah J. PooleAugust 11, 2010
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment