USA Today reports: How corporations and the rich are fueling inequality
Political and economic power are now inseparable. We must dismantle not just this abysmal plan but also the structural conditions that wrought it.
The tax plan that Republican congressional leaders hope to pass this week and send to President Trump will soon be regarded as the zenith in a story nearly 40 years in the making, where corporations and a handful of America’s wealthiest families — some of whom now hold positions in the government directly — leverage their outsized economic power into political power. It is what happens when corporate and political power become inseparable. It is a call to arms to dismantle not just the plan itself, but the structural conditions that wrought it.
The compromise House-Senate plan, like the separate bills each chamber passed earlier, so lacks a clear policy or economic justification that it can only be explained as pure pander to Republican donor interests. Though have some tried to marshal policy arguments in favor, each fails on its merits.
Economists and CEOs on both the left and right have been clear that the massive corporate tax cuts will not create jobs. The Tax Policy Center, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and every other credible analysis has indicated only a small share of the corporate windfall will reach workers. Even CEOs themselves admitted they would not use the money to invest. And the most damning evidence that the GOP’s purpose is to appease donor interests came from senators themselves, who admitted their financial contributions would dry up if they didn’t pass a tax package.
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Like the multinational corporations that demanded it, the Republican tax bill is extractive, taking money from middle-class Americans in order to finance tax cuts for the rich. In much the same way that corporate executives leverage their power to outsource jobs, borrow money, close plants, and squeeze supply chains in order to provide pay-outs to the company’s wealthy shareholders, Republicans have leveraged their power to raise taxes on workers, cut Medicare, borrow money from future generations, and outsource jobs in order to provide pay-outs to the corporate interests that are, in effect, congressional Republicans’ wealthy shareholders. When Senate Democrats offered an amendment to require corporations benefiting from the tax cut to raise wages at the same rate they reward shareholders and CEOs, every single Republican senator opposed it.
Those Republican cons in the know
have their tax scam all ready to go.
Watch the rich get a lift
and the poor get short shrift
by kleptocracy’s brutal elbow.
When kleptocracy’s brutal elbow
delivers its mightiest blow,
democracy loses
and nurses its bruises
in a trumpian reality show.
Susan Eckenrode, 12/18/17
