My take on the week ahead: Congress is back this week, so you can expect more of the “we can’t afford it” bullsh*t from every Republican member of Congress and two Democratic senators (Manchin and Sinema) — aimed against Biden’s and the Democrat’s social investment bill.
Behind the scenes, big corporations and Wall Street are paying huge bucks to feed this hokum to the public. And the mainstream media is doing their bidding. So it should be no surprise that Americans are utterly confused and many are misinformed about what’s at stake in this important legislation, which will come to a head in the next few weeks.
Let's take my Friday interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett as Exhibit A.
She started by asking me: “The big question is whether Democrats can afford all of this.” By making this her first question, she’s already framing the debate around the cost of the plan. And by phrasing it as “whether Democrats can afford,” she’s making it a partisan issue.
Let’s be clear: Every rich country other than the United States already provides childcare, pre-K, child assistance, paid family leave, subsidized college, decent housing, and health coverage extending to vision and hearing. Every other rich country is taking measures to reduce climate change. We are the richest of the rich. Of course America can afford these.
In fact, there’s a good argument that making these investments will grow the economy (childcare will free more people to join the workforce, pre-K and community college will make our workforce more productive, and so on), while not making them will create huge costs down the line (the tab from wildfires and floods due to climate change is already mammoth).
Erin Burnett’s other guest, a former Republican governor, then argued we can’t afford these things because the national debt is too high.
This is a slight-of-hand. The national debt isn’t at issue. There’s no reason for the debt to grow if we tax the wealthy and big corporations to pay for the plan, as Biden and most Democrats — and the vast majority of the public — want to. Simply repealing the Trump-Republican tax cut to the rich and big corporations would pay for almost half the cost of the plan.
Biden is asking the wealthy to pay their fair share in taxes, but Burnett shows two slides purporting to show that they already pay their fair share (one showing the richest 20 percent of Americans pay 78 percent of the nation’s taxes, the other showing that the richest 1 percent – who pull in 20.9 percent of the nation’s earnings -- pay over 40 percent).
This is seriously misleading because the ultra-wealthy pay almost nothing in taxes. For example, Jeff Bezos, the richest person in America, didn't pay any income taxes for at least two years between 2006 and 2018.
How can the ultra-wealthy maintain their lavish lifestyles and pay almost no income taxes? By keeping their incomes small and borrowing against their vast wealth. (Bezos’s yearly income is only around $81,000.)
To give you some idea of how much wealth is now at the top, America’s 660 billionaires increased their wealth by $1.8 trillion just since the start of the pandemic. That’s half the cost of Biden’s entire plan right there.
Hence the fallacy of using shares of income rather than wealth to determine what’s a fair tax. Wealth is far more concentrated at the top than is income. The wealthiest 0.1 percent have as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent put together. This argues for a wealth tax or higher capital gains taxes, increased inheritance taxes, and a bar on heirs inheriting vast fortunes without paying capital gains on them.
Finally, the figures Burnett cited only look at federal taxes. State taxes – which comprise half the total tax revenue going to government – impose a disproportionate burden on lower-income people. That’s because they come largely in the form of sales taxes, which take a bigger chunk out of lower incomes.
Biden’s plan may be the last chance we get to fix what’s broken in our system. But the public knows little or nothing about it — other than it will cost a bundle. Even if Biden and other Democrats are doing a poor job explaining it, the mainstream media is doing a horrendous job. A democracy requires informed citizens. How are Americans to be informed about something as crucial to their future as this, when they’re being systematically misled?
PS: People often ask me “how do you keep your cool on these TV shows?” The short answer is I often don’t. I almost lost it with Erin Burnett.
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