This is a late response to Anselm Staack’s My Turn on the Empire’s editorial page of Sept. 27. Anselm’s comments made my day. His comments in September were partly about the GOP’s campaign to “Repeal Obamacare.” With the total failure by the Republican Congress and Trump White House to “Repeal Obamacare,” we can now move on to Anselm’s next issue, the Trump/GOP version of this month’s latest hot ticket meme: tax reform. To me, there is nothing like a full-throated rant against the Koch-financed, hate-filled propaganda campaigns at the root of the Trump/GOP versions of “Repeal Obamacare,” and “tax reform.”
If eventually successful, both these programs — by forcing people to pay the private insurance industry for increasingly expensive, increasingly needed healthcare for themselves and their families, and by slowly removing tax breaks, over time, from individuals, families and small businesses — the Trump/GOP will take increasing amounts of money out of the pockets of the unemployed, the homeless, the underemployed, the low-income people, the middle-income people, and even the relatively high-income people.
In the Trump/GOP propaganda that supports the “tax reform” meme we hear a lot about how wealth will “trickle-down” from the wealthy to the poor. That is a bogus argument. The evidence of wealth flows over history since the beginning of the industrial age, says otherwise. Over time, in the absence of one or more of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, wealth will “trickle up,” from the poorest to the richest. Under the Trump/GOP coalition, that historic trend will rapidly escalate upward.
With all that extra tax revenue diverted out of our pockets into the public treasury in the name of “tax reform,” the Trump/GOP coalition can further stuff the personal pockets, and the mostly off-shore bank accounts, of the already unimaginably wealthy. The accounts of the unimaginably wealthy are already overstuffed with excess, underutilized cash. The two Koch brothers, for example, were reported, recently, to have a net worth of $96.6 billion. Their continuing, very public financial support for those who want to take American democracy away from the “We the People…”, specified in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, probably amounts to less than the rounding error on the value of Koch wealth.
Give me a break.
For more on the subject of too much money being held in fiscal limbo, by way too few people, read Jane Mayer’s 2016 book, “Dark Money.”
For those in my own community who want to restore the senior tax exemption to the glory days when every purchase was tax-exempt. Forget it. I’m a senior, and I’d rather pay my sales tax money to the CBJ for local public schools, higher education, police and fire protection, and well-maintained utilities, transportation and healthcare systems than see my money end up in the hands of some international corporation that hides their profits overseas and spends all their time – and all the time of their high-paid lobbyists — whining to the Trump/GOP coalition about how they don’t want to pay their taxes.
I look forward to Anselm’s next commentary.
• Jerry Smetzer resides in Juneau. My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire.
