Okay, let’s get one thing out of the way at the start: very few people enjoy paying taxes. To that I can only add my own personal observation that the people who seem to complain the loudest about taxes are the ones who can most afford to pay them. They have an excellent means of making their complaints heard, too – it’s called the Republican Party. In fact, in service to those who would pay not a single dime more than the historic low rates they’re paying today, the G.O.P. is creating a default crisis out of whole cloth by linking the authorization of additional borrowing to the conclusion of a draconian budget agreement that will gut the essential social programs they have always sought to defund, privatize, etc.
The two things, of course, have nothing to do with one another in the real world. Raising the debt ceiling is merely addressing financial commitments that have already been agreed upon. It is something the Republicans have gladly passed many times before under their own presidents, as well as under Democrats. They have seized upon it because it offers an opportunity to, in effect, put the entire nation up against a wall until we give up on the idea of not spending our elderly years in penury. (That’s sooooo 1960’s of us.) The Republicans see an opportunity here to realize what they could never accomplish during George W. Bush’s tenure – privatization of Medicare, pirating Social Security, and locking in massive tax cuts from now until perdition. And they sense, perhaps correctly, that the Democrats don’t have enough fight in them to stop it.
I will gladly crib Bernie Sanders, Keith Ellison, and Dean Baker on this – Social Security is not – repeat, not – part of any budgetary problem. It is fully self-funding for the next 25 years with no changes whatsoever. How many programs can make that claim? The G.O.P. and spineless Democrats merely want to pirate the fund to pay for extending Bush tax cuts for the richest people in the country. Regarding Medicare and Medicaid, they are single-payer systems dedicated to the elderly, poor, disabled, and stricken amongst us. The rest of us – those who are relatively young, fit, and almost never need a doctor – are reserved for the profit of private insurers. Single payers systems only pay for themselves when everyone – sick and well, old and young, rich and poor – participates in them. If we want to solve the funding problem, we need to decide whether we can continue to afford contriving a profitable market for companies like BlueCross.
In short, the deficit hawks in the Republican caucuses are blackmailing us into funding tax breaks for wealthy people – including the fuckers who caused the financial crisis – by crippling our already inadequate social safety net. I say, call their bluff. This is ground worth fighting for.
luv u,
jp
