American politics is largely devoted to the grand task of taking from some and giving to others, a sort of Robin Hood mania that has nothing to do with giving back to taxpayers what was taken from taxpayers (as in the legend) — or doing much of anything for the poor — but, instead, to ostentatiously give to some and quietly take from as many people as possible.
Nevertheless, that giving is not always ostentatious. Sometimes it is surreptitious.
Or at least not ballyhooed.
Kamala Harris has taken up an old Democratic Party stalking point: soak the rich! Though she tries not to mention just how much money she and her fellow Biden Administration insiders have been giving to a few big corporations.
“Despite Harris’ rhetoric of fighting for the middle class,” writes Jack Salmon at Reason, “her policies have disproportionately benefited the wealthy and large corporations while leaving middle- and lower-income Americans behind. Far from soaking the rich, Harris’ legacy has been one of feeding them.”
Corporate subsidies have “exploded,” explains Mr. Salmon, going from a ten-year budget allocation of $1.2 trillion in 2021 to now surpassing $2 trillion.
Nearly doubled!
“The beneficiaries of this largesse are extremely concentrated,” Salmon notes, most of it going to “just 15 large corporations, seven of which are foreign.” Of course, a lot of this is under cover of “saving the planet” and fighting “climate change”: “Wind turbine manufacturers like General Electric, Vestas, and Siemens/Gamesa — who collectively produce 79 percent of all turbines — are among the biggest winners.”
Robbing from the few and giving to the many makes neither for good mathematics or a winning political strategy. Robbing from the many and giving to the few is what usually works. But if your appeal is to “the left,” you have to pretend to grab most from the super-rich few.
Your pals.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
3 replies on “Kamala Hood”
When economists or politicians speak of a “ten year $1.2 trillion dollar budget allocation”, I have to ask: does that mean $1.2 trillion over ten years ($120 billion per year) or $1.2 trillion each year for ten years? One of the latest stories I heard was how a budget proposal, if enacted, would save $500 billion over ten years. To me, that means $50 billion a year. Congress can spend those ‘savings’ in one hour. That ‘saves’ nothing.
Here is who got the money from Trump’s tax cuts.
“Was skewed to the rich. Households with incomes in the top 1 percent will receive an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025, compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for households in the bottom 60 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center (TPC).[1] As a share of after-tax income, tax cuts at the top — for both households in the top 1 percent and the top 5 percent — are more than triple the total value of the tax cuts received for people with incomes in the bottom 60 percent.”
“President Trump approved $8.8 trillion of gross new borrowing and $443 billion of deficit reduction during his full presidential term.”
Pam, you don’t get money by its not being taken from you; you merely keep money that you had already got.
Only by imagining the state as sonehow the original and proper owner of the various form of wealth found within the jurisdiction of that state can one confusedly believe that a tax-cut simply is a subsidy.
Now, your confusion aside, certainly the Republicans have, like the Democrats, provided various genuine subsidies to persons who are already extremely affluent. These subsidies leave an especially bad taste in the mouth, though all subsidies are corrosive.
But the point relevant here is that the leadership of your political tribe likes to posture as robbing from the rich to give to the poor (a posture not adopted by the Republicans) even as those leaders are actually robbing from those who are not affluent and giving to those who are extremely wealthy.
You need to face what sort of knaves those leaders are, and what sort of fools follow those leaders.