I guess congressional Republicans can justify the tax legislation barreling through both houses right now by assuming that not enough average people will pay close attention; that enough voters will hear “tax cuts” and assume they’re getting some, too. How else could you think that raising taxes on millions of working- and middle-class families would be a good idea, and won’t result in an electoral wipeout in 2018? It’s clearer than ever that the main constituency of the GOP is their rich donor class, who make out like bandits under the proposed tax plans. They can try to sell it as a supply-side approach to goosing the economy, but at this stage of the game, I think the simplest explanation is the right one: they’re cutting taxes for their wealthy benefactors.
And why do rich people want their taxes cut? Because they want to be even richer — certainly not because they want to create jobs. This basic fact somehow gets obscured again and again, as if the essential fact of 1% greed had been placed in the witness protection program. It’s not just on taxes that we see this; siphoning money to the top is the blueprint of our entire economy at this point. If you thought we’d reached peak income inequality during the Obama administration, wait ‘til you see what the Trump years do to us, when the goal of transferring wealth upward has become the official policy of both elected branches of the U.S. government.
Most horrifying to me are the proposals that seem to be deliberate attacks on the idea of the U.S. as a country of social mobility. The repeal of the estate tax is Exhibit A; in the face of literally generations of consensus that the United States should not be a place of inherited, dynastic wealth, with all the threats to democracy such wealth poses, this Republican Congress apparently possesses a special wisdom that such fears are totally misplaced. But you need look no further than this very tax plan to see that those fears are in fact spot-on. To pay the bill for inheritance tax repeal, the tax code is rejiggered to attack the very deductions that help people climb into the middle class: the interest on college loans would no longer be deductible, employer educational contributions would be taxed, and other tuition breaks for grad students would be taxed as well. And it’s plain as day that, as in the past, the GOP will use the deficits their misguided tax legislation creates as an excuse to slash programs that benefit the middle- and lower-class, perpetuating the spiraling divide between American have's and have-not’s.
But as I’m writing today, I’m feeling the difficulty of talking about taxes in a way that feels meaningful in the way it should, in the same way that I’ve been bothered by the unhelpful abstraction of words like “deficits” and “national debt” and all the ginormous numbers associated with the U.S. budget. So let’s try this angle: I’m pretty sure the upper classes in this country clearly feel entitled to every penny they get in tax cuts. Indeed, that’s why they demand that their Republican legislators pass this sort of law. Meanwhile, the middle and working classes of the U.S. never seem to match the rich with equally strong tax cut demands — even though, unlike the rich, they could actually make good use of the money. In one sense, this is a sign of societal health: average Americans recognize that they’re helped by various forms of government spending on social programs, and so the desire for lower taxes is balanced against wanting those programs to continue. Put another way: ordinary people intuitively understand the idea of social goods, while many of the rich are essentially indifferent or even hostile to these goods, feeling themselves beyond the need of them.
I think one step that ordinary Americans should take at this point is, somewhat perversely, to get a little more aligned with the mindset of the upper class. For the upper class, every penny that does not go directly into their pockets is viewed as outright theft, a violation of the natural laws of the universe. The great broad swathe of the rest of America would do well to start thinking in an analogous way: every time a choice is made to reward the rich over the common, it is a form of theft from both their own pocketbooks and from our collective future. All these programs that benefit ordinary people, from Obamacare to the mortgage deduction, aren’t programs that government has doled out to us: they are benefits that we, through our government, gave ourselves, as part of our collective effort, however imperfect, to build the society we want.
The effects of the tax legislation in its current form will arguably be bigger in its overall damage to our common good than a repeal of Obamacare (see this Forbes article about some of the possible dire side effects of goosing a relatively high-performing economy and hampering our ability to respond to future downturns); yet while progressives hammered back repeated Obamacare repeal efforts, the outrage over the tax bills has so far been more muted. I think this is because health care repeal is so specific and felt viscerally, while the effects of tax legislation are not only more general and diffuse, but are intentionally wrapped in abstraction by those who want to get away with the resulting unfairness. That’s why I think it’s also important for people to acquaint themselves with the specific ways the tax legislation will hurt them and people they know, and to weigh this against the way it showers wealth upon those Americans who are hardly in desperate need of extra dollars.
I am really hoping for a Thanksgiving Hail Mary in the coming days, that people will feast with their families and friends and talk a little politics, and then re-brand Black Friday as the day Republican congressmen caught holy hell from their constituents, in a turkey leftovers-fueled barrage of democratic outrage.
