A friend recently sent me some figures that put the rhetoric about the 1% and the 99% into rather stark perspective.
Big business is once again doing well. Among the nation’s top 500 companies, corporate profits in 2013 averaged $41,249 per employee. That was 38 percent higher than the profit level in 2008, so the Great Recession is evidently over–at least, for those enterprises. Those who run the companies are also doing nicely, thank you very much: CEOs at companies listed in the S&P 500 took home paychecks that were 331 times the pay of the average American worker last year — and 774 times the take-home of minimum-wage workers.
If the minimum wage had just kept pace with income gains enjoyed by the top 1% since 1968–that is, if there had simply been parity in the rate of increase–minimum-wage workers would now be making $31.45 per hour.
What was that old economic premise/promise? A rising tide lifts all boats?
It’s time to say goodby and good riddance to the month of April–the “cruelest” month, presumably because federal taxes are due. And let’s face it, no one likes taxes.
And every year, the avalanche of anti-tax articles is predictable as April showers.
Over at The New Republic, Jonathan Cohn makes an important point: people resent paying taxes when they don’t see what that money is buying. I’ve made that same argument in the local context, and it is actually easier to see what our local money buys: police and fire protection, garbage collection, parks, schools and the like. Those local public goods are more visible than the goods our federal taxes purchase.
That payroll tax taken out of everybody’s check? It’s buying you Medicare and Social Security, which means a more secure retirement free of crippling medical bills. Your federal income tax? Its effects are a lot more diffuse. But chances are pretty good that you’ve already used some infrastructure today—whether it was a road or railway you took to work, or maybe the information technology connections you’re using to read this article. Federal, state, and local taxes helped pay for that. Is your water and air clean? Are you safe from threats, domestic and foreign? Then you’re getting something valuable from the Environment Protection Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Defense. Your tax dollars paid for those, too.
Sometimes, of course, your tax dollars pay for supports and services you won’t use. And you might resent that. But even taxes that pay for someone else’s benefits can benefit you. Why does the U.S. not have the massive underclass that characterizes many third-world countries—or the incipient danger of violent upheaval that accompanies it? The safety net your taxes purchased, tattered as it is, buys a degree of social harmony, too.
We can legitimately argue about lawmakers’ priorities. We can–and should–monitor government at all levels to insure that its operations are businesslike and efficient. We can debate whether government should do some things at all.
But while we are griping and doing everything we can to reduce our bills, we should take note of Cohn’s admonition, and remember that our tax dollars buy a lot of things that most of us agree–however grudgingly– make our lives safer and better. Things we would miss.
In the private sector, we acknowledge the truth of the old adage: you get what you pay for. Somehow, we ignore that homely truth when it comes to taxes.
I haven’t posted about the bizarre episode that Jon Stewart aptly dubbed “Apocalypse Cow,” because–to be candid–I’ve had a huge problem understanding why anyone would rush to the defense of a guy whose claim to fame is that he doesn’t pay his bills.
The facts aren’t really in dispute: when Bureau of Land Management rangers attempted to enforce a court order to confiscate cattle owned by Cliven Bundy, an assortment of militiamen, “patriots” and assorted kooks–all armed–came to his defense. The government, fearing another Waco, temporarily retreated. This bit of adult restraint was celebrated by Bundy’s ragtag army as a great victory.
Bundy has been illegally grazing his herd on public land since 1993. He never paid the very minimal grazing fees initially imposed by President Reagan, and several courts have confirmed that he currently owes taxpayers over a million dollars.
His “defense” is that he doesn’t recognize the existence of the federal government.
What I don’t get is the Right’s wholesale embrace of this “taker.” Fox News–especially Sean Hannity–rushed to defend a guy who proudly admits to ripping off government and the taxpayers. The network that routinely excoriates “welfare cheaters” evidently saw no irony in its defense of a brazen moocher.
It turns out that rural radicalism is nothing new. In fact, Catherine McNicol Stock wrote a book documenting a long tradition of rural extremism in the U.S.
As Stock noted, the arrest of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing gave homegrown terrorism a face, and that face turned out to be white-skinned, blue-eyed and clean-shaven. Networks of home-grown, small-town militiamen, conspiracists, survivalists, and white supremacists who had been there all along, suddenly became visible. They are heirs to “a tradition as old as the country itself, characteristically angry and frequently violent, rendering patriotism as intolerance.”
The recurring themes in rural radical movements are familiar: anti-federalism, white supremacy, populism, and vigilantism.
Cliven Bundy has proved himself an heir to the entirety of that radical tradition, but ironically, when he shared his overtly racist views, it suddenly became “a bridge too far” even for Fox, which prefers its racism to be (slightly) more subtle.
What I still don’t get, however, is what attracted them to this moocher in the first place.
Ms. Betty Bowers–my favorite Christian–takes a look at the Civil War, and especially Lincoln’s determination not to allow the South to secede, and wonders whether he made the right choice.
Betty paints with a pretty broad brush, but it’s hard to argue with her characterizations of North versus South….
Yesterday, I posted the text of a speech I delivered at Monday to Greenwood Rotary. Today, I’ll share the rest of the story.
Let me set the stage, however, by being fair and pointing out that (1) the subject of the speech–the importance of science and what it tells us–was the choice of the Chapter President; (2) the program chair, with whom I chatted during the (dreadful) lunch, was not only receptive, but warned me that “a lot” of the members were “really conservative–you should have heard them during the debate over HJR3!” and (3) the average age in the room made me feel young by comparison.
The very first “question”(okay, rebuttal) was from a gentleman who rather patronizingly asked me if I understood the difference between “observational” and historical science. Actually, I do–or at least, I know people who promote that misleading distinction. (One of the most prominent is a website called “Answers in Genesis.”) As one science blog has explained,
AIG is arguing that only scientific results that can be replicated in the lab are “observational science.” Or to put it another way, only those results that we can experience – that impinge on our senses – are scientific results.
By implication, only these verifiable results are “true” science that produces true, certain knowledge. Any other form of scientific reasoning is “historical science,” which is not certain and thus, by implication, crap. At least, it’s crap whenever AIG finds that it doesn’t square with their creationism.
This is weird…. After all, the claims of Christian tradition, including creationism, are not verifiable in the lab.
This “question” put me in something of a bind; I didn’t want to say what I thought, which was essentially “Oh, I see you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid,” so I mumbled my way through a marginally nicer response and moved on to the next questioner, who suggested that science was just as “faith-based” as religion. I begged to differ, refrained from beating my head against the podium, and again moved on.
The entire question and answer period was like that.
The final question was “Even if climate change is real, maybe it’s good. What do you think?” I’d been on my best behavior up to that point, but I sort of snapped. I told him–sweetly–that whether it was good or bad depended on what you thought about Florida being underwater; it is, after all, a state that has caused the country considerable problems. Perhaps losing it would be a good thing.
When the question and answer period was over, a couple of elderly gentlemen did come up to whisper that they agreed with me. But another cornered me, insisting that I needed to review a “fantastic” website that demonstrated clearly just how scientists had sold the “scam” of evolution.
As I was making my break for the door, I smiled weakly at the program director and said “At least I wasn’t tarred and feathered!”
He smiled back and said, “You aren’t out the door yet.”
