Taxing Workers Was Not Mentioned in the Trump-Biden Debate - It Should Have Been The Main Topic

Article by WN.Com Correspondent Dallas Darling

The public understands that sufficient tax revenues are crucial to fund essential social and economic services, including public education, healthcare, and businesses which help both high- and low-income earners, or the sick, the elderly, and those with disabilities. But you would not have known it from watching last night’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden. Indeed, and for plutocrats with their tax-avoidance schemes and lower rates applied to capital gains, or the Trump administration’s recent reforms that slashed the corporate tax rate a whopping 14 percent, it is the wealthy and corporations that are not paying their fair share of taxes instead of the lower and middle class workers.

Who Really Pays the Price

A new report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that millions of low-income workers effectively face marginal tax rates of more than 70 percent when adjusted for the loss of government benefits.

That means for every $1000 gained in income, $700 goes to government taxes or reduced spending. In some cases, there are no gains at all. In the meantime, high-income earners and corporations use the nation’s infrastructures and public transportation systems much more than the economically disadvantaged and benefit from gratuities, such as tax breaks and write-offs or subsidies in the form of grants and taxpayer funded bailouts. The director, consequently, called it "a policy that creates a perverse incentive to try to exit poverty." (1)

“You Didn’t Build That”

Another perverse policy is how the tax code has gradually been written to favor high-income earners, like Donald Trump.

In addition to released tax records showing that he paid no federal income taxes in 10 of 15 years that preceded his election in 2016, there were many incidences of tax maneuvering schemes: claiming business deductions for expenses which are clearly personal instead of business related. Some of the deductions ranged from $70,000 for hair stylists to millions of dollars in “consulting fees” for his daughter, Ivanka Trump-now a White House senior advisor. Other write-off schemes to avoid paying taxes consisted of pouring mysterious large amounts of money into opaque businesses suffering mysteriously high losses. (2)

Targeting the Poor

When the late New York City real estate magnate Leona Helmsley infamously said, “only the little people pay taxes,” she was right.

Another recent report revealed how the Internal Revenue Service audits poorer districts at a higher rate than wealthy districts. Humphreys County in Mississippi is one of many examples. ProPublica found that about 12 out of 1000 tax returns are audited each year in the county. That is 53 percent higher than the national average and raises the question as to why the IRS targets poor communities instead of districts like Manhattan, Dallas, or San Francisco where millionaires and billionaires live. “Most people around here are adjusted to the idea that the rich get richer and poor get poorer,” said a Humphrey County mayor. (3)

What the Media Wants You to Believe

Joe Biden is promising to raise taxes only on families making $400,000 or more each year-the top 1.8 percent of taxpayers. Even then, the media tries to instill fear by warning his plan will turn America into a communist nation or hurt low- and middle-income earners.

The latest fear-mongering came from CNBC which aired experts saying, “rich people are really barely making it.” This is exactly what the plutocrats want, specifically since they own the corporate media and socially engineer a gullible public.

By reframing the reality about taxation, the corporate media also want you to forget how most of the benefits from increasing worker productivity go into the pockets of the wealthy or how a large portion of a corporation’s profits compensates its CEO. (4)

Gales of Creative Destruction

If you ever wonder how 14 percent of households with children reported that they did not get enough food to eat in the last seven days, look at other plutocrats in the government like Senator Mitch McConnell and Larry Kudlow, the Trump administration’s National Economic Council. With millions of Americans out of work, struggling to afford food for themselves and their children, and facing the possibility of losing their homes, they are more concerned about appointing a justice for the supreme court and Wall Street than helping hardworking families.

Joe Biden
@JoeBiden

2020-10-23 01:37:00

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Aaron Rupar
@atrupar

Obama: "[Trump] has not shown any interest in doing the work or helping anybody but himself & his friends or treati… https://t.co/jiimfRZ2TL

2020-10-21 22:17:50

129191

Rachel Maddow MSNBC
@maddow

"Senator Ron Johnson began the process of selling his company in February 2018, just months after he insisted the T… https://t.co/hR9sp77CW8

2020-10-21 17:57:00

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“The talk is that a lot of folks who became unemployed… are going out and starting new businesses. It is another great example of the “gales of creative destruction,” said Kudlow. (5)

Until Workers Rebel

Until workers rebel against the plutocrats and make taxation a major topic of debate in national politics, there will be more gales of creative destruction that primarily hurt low- and middle-income earners.

Dallas Darling (darling@wn.com)

(1) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-15/tax-burden-equal-to-70-rate-crushes-americans-unable-to-pay-it.

(2) https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/donald-trump-tax.html.

(3) https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/politics/2019/04/02/irs-audits-most-in-us-in-mississippi-humphreys-county-study-poor-taxpayers-african-americans/3335376002/.

(4) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/06/biden-defines-400000-a-year-as-wealthy-how-far-it-goes-in-a-city-.html.

(5) https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/16/trumps-millionaire-economic-adviser-celebrates-gales-creative-destruction-millions.