If
Obama's health law is reversed, taxes will go down for the rich and up for the
poor, while millions lose coverage.
Great magicians are masters of diversion. They attract our
attention with one hand while using the other to trick us into thinking a
supernatural act is taking place.
But even the best street performers could learn a lesson from
the folks in Congress who are trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also
known as Obamacare.
When we talk about repealing Obamacare, we almost never talk
about the windfall payday it would bring to multi-millionaires and
billionaires. In fact, this massive tax cut is the proverbial card hiding in
the sleeve of lawmakers pushing repeal.
A new study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows the 400
richest Americans, a group whose average annual income tops $300 million each,
would get a combined annual tax cut of $2.8 billion if the Affordable Care Act
is repealed.
In other words, people who already have more money than they could
spend in a dozen lifetimes would get a massive pile of cash.
Meanwhile, those who make less than $200,000 per year — also known as “the rest of us” — would see no benefit. That’s because the two taxes that funded the expansion in health care coverage included as part of Obamacare don’t extend to these moderate-income households.
And many of us would do worse.
In fact, about 7 million low-income people would actually see
their taxes go up if the law’s repealed, since they’d lose insurance premium
tax credits that were enacted as part of the bill.
So, to be perfectly clear on this point, repealing Obamacare
equals payday for the wealthiest households and higher taxes for the poorest
households — millions of whom would also lose their health coverage.
Remember the story of Robin Hood? It’s just like that, but
backwards.
Poll after poll shows Americans have no idea how concentrated
wealth inequality is today — it’s far worse than most suspect.
A report I co-authored last year looked at the 400
wealthiest individuals in the country. This group together owns more wealth
than the entire GDP of India, a country with over a billion people.
The report also showed this great concentration of wealth splits
largely, although not exclusively, along racial lines. The 100 wealthiest
Americans, none of whom are black, today own more wealth than the entire
African-American population combined.
Unsurprisingly, most of us would like to live in a much more
egalitarian society. If we can’t swing it, economist and author Thomas Piketty
warns, we’re heading towards a hereditary aristocracy of wealth and power,
where the children of today’s billionaires will dominate our economy and our
government.
As we look back at the Obama legacy, we see a number of efforts
aimed at beginning to bridge that massive wealth divide. From expanding
opportunities for low-income children and families to asking the ultra-wealthy
to pay their fair share, progress has been made on this front in the past eight
years.
The Affordable Care Act was one of these efforts, and it touched
directly on issues of life and death.
Don’t be fooled by the smoke and mirrors of today’s
illusionists: Repealing it will directly counteract this progress. It will
further concentrate wealth into fewer hands and strip low-income families of
what little resources they have.
Josh
Hoxie directs the Project on Taxation and Opportunity at the Institute for
Policy Studies. Distributed by OtherWords.org.