New GOP plan to raise taxes on working people & end Social Security & Medicare
By Thom Hartmann for the
This time
it’s the guy in charge of getting Republican senators elected and re-elected,
Florida’s Senator Rick Scott.
You may
remember him as the guy who ran the company convicted of the largest Medicare
fraud in the history of America, who then took his money and ran for Governor
of Florida, where he prevented the state from expanding Medicaid for low-income
Floridians for all the years he ran the state.
Now he’s
the second-richest guy in the senate and, IMHO, the leading candidate for the
GOP nomination for president in 2024. And, true to form, he’s echoing the
sentiments of the richest guy in the Senate, Mitt Romney, the last guy before
Trump to have that nomination.
“There
are 47 percent who are with him,” Romney said of Obama voters
back in 2012, “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are
victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who
believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name
it. These are people who pay no income tax.”
Low
income working people in America generally pay a higher
percentage of their income as taxes than do most of our billionaires and
multi-multi-millionaires. They pay Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes,
property taxes, sales taxes, taxes in the form of fees for everything from a
driver’s license to road tolls to annual car inspections.
As Romney pointed out, though, about 47 percent of Americans in 2012 made so little money that, after applying the standard deduction, they paid no income tax.
This
doesn’t just reveal how few people pay taxes, though. To the contrary, it
reveals how many Americans are living in or on the edge of poverty.
The
simple reality is if you want more people to pay income taxes, all you have to
do is raise working people’s pay. We saw this in a big way between 1950 and
1980, when Keynesian economics reigned and labor unions helped wages — and the
taxes they paid — steadily rise for working people.
But
Republicans don’t like the idea of what they call “wage inflation.” They’d
rather just squeeze working people harder, while continuing their subsidies of
the lifestyles of the morbidly rich “donor class.”
More than
half of Americans make so little money from their employment that they can’t
deal with an unexpected $1000 expense like a car accident or medical
bill. And it’s these very people who Rick Scott and the GOP believe need
to be further taxed so they’ll have what Scott calls “skin in the game.”
In the
early years of the Reagan administration, before his neoliberal “trickle down”
and “supply side” policies started to really bite Americans, only 18 percent of
Americans were so poor that their income didn’t qualify to be taxed.
As “Right
to Work for Less” laws spread across America and Republicans on the Supreme
Court made it harder for unions to function, more and more working people fell below the tax
threshold.
Today it
takes two working adults to maintain the same lifestyle that one worker could
provide in 1980, so an estimated 61 percent
of working Americans this year will make so little pay that their income isn’t
subject to taxation.
Rick Scott and the GOP’s solution to this situation isn’t to raise the income of working-class people.
Quite to the contrary, they’re suggesting that
low-income people should be hit with their very own income tax — in addition to
the dozens of other taxes they’re already paying — all so multimillionaires and
billionaires like Scott and his friends can hope to see their own taxes go down
a tiny bit.
Doing his
best imitation of Newt Gingrich, Scott has rolled out his 11-point-plan to
soak the American middle class, lock down elections, destroy consumer
protections, increase pollution and climate change, and squeeze a few more
dollars out of every family, no matter how tight their budgets may already be.
Scott
calls that “rescuing America.” And it may be true, if you’re morbidly rich and
made your money spewing pollution or hustling opioids.
His plan
not only calls for a 50 percent cut in the IRS workforce, presumably to end all
audits of rich people like Scott, but also demands all federal
legislation to “sunset” within five years. That would almost certainly
end Social Security and Medicare, programs that have been in the crosshairs of
Republicans since Reagan’s day.
Realizing
how “raising taxes on 60% of American voters” will play in campaign ads, Mitch
McConnell has backed away from Scott’s bizarre proposal. But Fox “News”
is all over it, inviting Scott on repeatedly to hawk his plan and prepare the
ground for his candidacy. After all, billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and
his family need their tax breaks!
As Sean
Hannity told Scott during a
recent appearance, “I want to applaud you. I'd like to see the House and the
Senate come together on these issues, make these promises to the American
people, get elected and then fulfill those promises.”
No doubt
multi-millionaire Hannity was speaking his own truth. But for the majority of
Americans who are so poor they barely have to pay income taxes, Scott’s plan is
just the latest in a 40-year barrage of assaults and insults coming from the
GOP.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of Big Brother in America and more than 30+ other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.
