A protest in Madison, Wisconsin. Credit: Flickr/keegstra (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Here’s our problem
It keeps getting harder and harder to make ends meet, but working people have to shoulder far more than our fair share of taxes while the ultra-rich and their corporations pay next to nothing.
We need every bit of our paycheck to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads, but millionaires and billionaires who can easily afford to pay have elaborate ways they can move their money to avoid taxes.
Because wealth is distributed in such an extremely unequal way, when the rich don’t pay taxes then there’s no way to fund the public services we need and establish new programs to deal with the huge problems facing the working class.
The con game of billionaires
Trump wants to take advantage of people’s completely justified hatred of the tax system to introduce “reforms” that help rich people pay even less. Look at what Trump has already done the last time he was in office – the bill he signed into law in 2017 was effectively a $2 trillion tax cut for the rich and the corporations they own. It lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, and cut the personal tax rate for people making over $500,000 a year. It also weakened the estate tax so that people could leave up to $11.2 million to their heirs without paying a penny of taxes.
This 2017 tax law expires in 2025, and one of Trump’s first orders of business will be passing a new one. He might include a few measures that will be helpful to workers, like ending taxes on tips or car loan payments. But those will be tiny in comparison with the huge tax breaks he plans to give his billionaire friends.
Trump and others around him have even considered getting rid of the IRS entirely. Billy Long, the former Congressman Trump nominated to lead the agency, has previously introduced legislation to abolish the IRS. That might sound like a good thing, but it’s really about two goals: starving public programs of funding, and making it even easier for the rich to evade taxes.
If the IRS is defunded or eliminated altogether, then there will be no one to audit rich people and corporations’ tax filings, giving them a green light to commit blatant fraud. And if very little revenue is coming into the government, then a few years down the line the politicians will turn around and say that the only way to balance the budget is to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other absolutely vital programs working people rely on.
The real answer for the working class
The tax system should be a tool to make sure that programs for working people have the funding they need. We can do this by abolishing billionaires with a 100% tax on all income over $10 million.
Billionaires and mega-millionaires should not exist. No one works so much harder than the rest of us that they truly earned $10 million or more. With very few exceptions, the only way someone can get that much money is by exploiting other people and selling the fruits of their labor for a profit. Besides, who actually needs more than $10 million? Is it that horrible to only have one yacht instead of two? The idea that a tiny handful of people should enjoy a life of unimaginable luxury while most people struggle just to survive is a moral and political outrage.
This article is also available as a downloadable pamphlet here.
