Senator Pat Toomey is a Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, and therefore, one of my Senators in Congress. He also has been very involved in crafting the tax bill that is working its way through the Senate (with minimal debate) and eventually will be reconciled with a similar bill passed in the House of Representatives. In his last two weekly email alerts, he has written: My office and I have been speaking to Pennsylvania business leaders about what tax reform means to them… “ Like most of the talking heads out of the Republican leadership, they seem to assume that (1) the only ones who know anything about taxes are business leaders; and (2) therefore it is only their views that matters. Toomey’s Pennsylvania Senate colleague, Bob Casey, counters by calling the tax bill “a massive giveaway to the wealthy at the expense of the middle class.” Non-partisan analysts agree with Casey that whatever benefits may come from this bill, the average middle-class Americans will not be the beneficiaries. Instead, it will be the corporations and CEOs.
Senator Robert Casey
Why won’t Senator Toomey and all his colleagues consult the low-income workers in their states? How about the service workers who must work two and three jobs to stay afloat? How about talking to teachers in underfunded schools or community workers reaching out to those who may not have enough get by on? Did they consult the senior citizens whose Medicare payments may be cut, or the single moms & dads trying to feed a family on one paycheck? How about the mid-level workers in these large companies: the folks in the warehouses, the factories, and the office carrels? Could it be these folks might not be so wild about a tax plan and continues to line the pockets of the wealthy?
Todd Carmichael, CEO of La Colombe coffee in a recent editorial says it plainly: [W]hat every CEO knows but won’t tell you is this: A tax break for their company simply means a fatter bottom line. Not jobs. Not investment. Just more money in the pockets of folks like me.” Carmichael goes on to explain that the economy is overstimulated and there are unprecedented amounts of money already looking for investment. In essence, he is saying companies have more money than they know what to do with and their only options are to reward shareholders or themselves. He concludes: “Congress is missing the majority of Americans who need a stimulus.”
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not against business per se, but there is a difference between global corporate giants like Comcast or Exxon, and the local Burlap and Bean coffee shop or the young entrepreneur starting a software consulting business. And there is a big difference between giving a break to a corporate giant like Jamie Dimon of Goldman- Sachs, and Mavis the haridresser or Tood the mechanic.
The promise we are being given is that if big business gets a tax break, they will create jobs or bring jobs back to the U.S. Businesses are sitting on some their highest revenues in a decade, and they aren’t creating jobs, they are giving their CEOs bonuses and their stockholders bigger dividends. We have been down this road before in the 1980’s with Ronald Reagan and “trickle-down economics.” Business got huge breaks, big business made off like bandits and bottom lines looked really good, and economic disparity grew. The gap between the 1% and everyone else started with the Reagan tax cuts, and most of us have been short-changed ever since. If we want to incentivize the creation and return of jobs, give tax breaks to those businesses who actually create jobs or increase good-paying jobs. Isn’t that the capitalist way – reward those who actually work for it? Give tax breaks to businesses that partner with local public schools to help train the next generation of workers. Assure that any tax breaks businesses get don’t go first to shareholders or executives but result in a pay increase to mid-level workers and below.
In this blog I have regularly talked about our government as not a democracy but rather a plutocracy. This proposed bill is one of the most blatant examples of that. My guess is if Senator Toomey and his ilk didn’t just talk to their wealthy business funders, but spoke to all the different sectors of people they actually are elected to represent (and cared about what they heard), they would not be so sure of this bill. We must call this tax bill what it is: a scam on the average citizen.. Whether we personally win or lose with this tax plan, if we are people of faith and conscience, we must realize this tax bill is a scam and a scourge on low-income and working-class people, and we must say NO! And if it passes, which it may, we must devise ways to stall, obstruct, undermine and otherwise render inert this effort by Congress to ignore their constituents. If they will not come to us, we must get in their face, be it thru letters, marches, or civil disobedience, if necessary.
What these legislators are trying to do is immoral, obscene and evil, and must be stopped.
Thank you again Drick! You represent people of faith and conscience well on so many levels and topics – thank you for speaking out on this one too. You have again compassionately included those who so many pundits, bloggers, people standing in opposition to the new tax plan leave out – those with whom Jesus most identified – the least of these – and yet the faith community as a whole still leaves them out. We see so much about how the middle class are going to lose out and that’s true; just as in the Bush era when many lost millions from their retirement funds. They are still way better off than those beneath them, whose labor their stocks grow from, who are held at the bottom because of inadequate, underfunded educational opportunities, no way out of poverty, hungry, homeless, with little to no hope. This is like the roots of thistle plants that spread and grow underground and sprout up all over the place – including replacing the ACA aka Obamacare with Trumpcare, deregulation of Wall Street and the Banking Industry, cuts for everything from daycare, school lunch programs and after school programs to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security – for the most vulnerable, the least likely to vote because they are either not yet old enough to vote, unable to get to the poles to vote because they are working 2 or 3 jobs or too old and without a means to get to the poles – why would greedy people who will benefit from this tax plan care about them??? Donald Trump and his ilk – the majority in Congress and the Senate – are everything that God hates; but it took a whole lot of people who claim to be Christ-followers (70+% of Evangelicals and >40% of Catholics) voted them into office – that’s even scarier than the fact of who’s running this country who are evil to its logical extreme.
Thank you for your leadership, for speaking out against this previously unimaginable evil and greed of people who already have more than they know what to do with. My birth father, a multi-billionaire recently died, leaving everything he owned to one son. He even left his wife, who lovingly put up with a lot of abuse, out because he was afraid she would fall in love with another man and spend it on him. I am a single mother with lots of children, living literally by faith and I am way richer than that man or my brother – because they never have enough and I have more than I need. All this greed and its concomitant wealth isn’t even doing any good and won’t; it truly is and can be traced to the root of all evil.
Thank you for your encouragement, stimulation, motivation . . . to fight against the evil and injustices that keep flying out of it.