Reversing the Income Flow

It wasn’t that much of a concern to ordinary people some thirty years ago when President Reagan cut taxes on the rich and made his speeches on TV about how “Supply Side Economics” would benefit everybody. After all, ordinary people have other concerns, like dealing with their own household budgets. But now the results are in. We’ve gotten to a position where ordinary people can feel the effects.

Just installing a structural bias in government policy apparently wasn’t enough, and recent greed has exposed the process of how the rich have been looting the US tax funds. Not only were billions of dollars unaccounted for in the Iraq War, but billions went to a small group of companies that caused a world-wide economic crisis and then cried to be bailed-out.

We failed to pay attention to history, or at least to insist that it not be repeated. The recent near-depression isn’t the first crash tied to “trickle-down" economics. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith attributed the Panic of 1896 to the same kind of economic policies. So we didn’t pay attention, and now there is rampant unemployment, “Occupy Wall Street” protests in the streets and a “Poverty Tour” making the rounds. These are calls to reverse the income flow which has carried all that money to the top 10%, and more specifically to the top 1% of the wealthiest in the US.

Proposals for raising taxes on the wealthy have provoked complaints about socialism and “forcibly seizing” wealth from the rich to give to the poor. The truth is that going too far in either the direction of unregulated capitalism or stagnating socialism is bad for the country—we need the middle road. However, the excesses of the last thirty years need to be undone. We need to raise taxes on the wealthy, and institute polices that use the taxpayer’s money for neglected infrastructure and research and development. We need policies that regulate companies that make sure they behave responsibly and don’t take all the profit while transferring all the costs of their business to the taxpayers.

This has all been proposed, but so far it’s been blocked. That means we need to look at breaking the hold that the rich have on our politics. Campaign reform, anyone?