Kelly Macias of Daily Kos discusses an essay the Rev. William Barber published in The Guardian (just before the bill passed).
I wrote a post back in 2013 discussing power and violence. In particular, every time someone is asserting power (in later posts I describe this as enforcing ranking) there is violence. This violence can be physical, mental, economic, or spiritual.
I’m pleased to see I have the same ideas as Barber. He described the bill as an act of violence. He noted the hypocrisy of giving tax cuts to corporations and the very wealthy at the expense of the poor. Wrote Barber:
The claim of the cuts is scarcity. But we do not have scarcity of money; we have a scarcity of moral will. We have an abundance of resources that could end poverty for everyone..
…
We know our nation has a heart problem when our elected leaders would rather fight a war on the poor than a war on poverty. This is bigger than any one bill. Legislation like this could only come so close to fruition in a broken political system
Both Macias and Barber skewer “trickle down” economics, the idea that if a lot of money is given to the rich some of it will trickle down to the poor and thus the poor will be better off. Except the rich make sure very little trickles down. And the smaller federal revenue is matched by cuts to help the poor.
In reading that a thought popped into my head. If the goal is to benefit the poor, instead of giving money to the rich in hopes that some of it reaches the poor, it would be so much more effective to, oh, I don’t know, perhaps … give it to the poor.
That could be done through a universal basic income. Or, if you don’t want to help lazy people, it could be done by increasing the minimum wage so that it is a livable wage. And then there is the whole issue of a tax code that taxes the income of poor people more aggressively than the income of rich people.
So, yeah, the purpose of this horrible bill is to take money from the poor, to increase their oppression.
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