Class warfare

Gosh, who didn’t see this one coming?

Marco Rubio said the GOP plan to tax the poor to give to the rich is the first step before “instituting structural changes to Social Security and Medicare.” Translation: gut.

All fall the various agencies that rate bills have been saying this bill blows a $1.5 trillion hole in the deficit. In sharp contrast to what the GOP said when Obama was in office they have been saying, “Deficit you say? Hmm.”

I (and many others) saw through the ruse. I commented (in another person’s blog) that I was sure the day after the bill was passed this gaping deficit would suddenly become hugely important to the GOP, causing them to demand correspondingly huge cuts to government social programs.

I was wrong about one thing. The GOP started talking about this the day *before* the vote on the bill. That’s more evidence that they believe they’ve already rigged the 2018 election sufficiently so they can’t lose.

One of the big selling points of the bill has been the claim that if corporations had more money they would create more jobs and boost wages. Yes, some of them will. However, Toluse Olorunnipa of Bloomberg reports that major companies will give the money to their shareholders or take other actions to boost stock price (the Dow Jones average hit another milestone high today). And shareholders tend not to be poor or working poor. They tend to already be rich.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville reminds us this “tax” bill is class warfare. She explains:

One of the most common rhetorical fallacies in U.S. politics is that raising taxes on wealthy people to help fund social programs for people in need is "class warfare." That is not class warfare. That is a basic economic necessity to maintain anything resembling a functional capitalist society.

We hear an awful lot about how taxation of the wealthy constitutes "a war on the rich" and is part of a "wealth redistribution" scheme to give away rich folks' hard-earned money to layabouts who refuse to provide for themselves with an honest day's work.

That is a lie. It is also a perfect projection of the reality of conservative economic policy — which is entirely dedicated to giving working people as little compensation as possible and then taking even more in taxation, to subsidize and reward the lazy lifestyles of a class comprised of investors, heirs, and people who themselves might have worked very hard once upon a time but now spend their days guarding piles of gold coins like insatiable dragons.

"Class warfare" is economic policy that is designed to plunder wealth from the lower classes and redistribute it upwards to create ever higher concentrates among the already-wealthy.

I’ll add another point. The GOP likes to say that government is too big and are taking this step as a way to force government to be smaller. Their analysis seems to stop there, that a big government being a bad thing should be blindingly obvious. But they are making this claim for a particular reason. A smaller government can’t afford to help minorities and those of the poor and working poor classes.