America, wealthiest nation on Earth, hub of global innovation, is the only place that doesn’t offer you free, straightforward healthcare. Our nation also lacks a slew of other safety nets and nice things that our friends across the water have had for decades. Perhaps you have heard this all before. That’s good, because this really simple discrepancy in the civilized world is finally reaching ears. I had the good fortune of living in London for a while, and I was floored by how easy it was to settle in and get some healthcare. I didn’t even have to sit on the phone with anybody or log into a digital portal, and it was completely free. When people in Europe pay their taxes, they get that money back in services. In America, tax money seems to enter a black hole. Or, more accurately, it lines the pockets of a thousand bureaucrats and inevitably returns to the richest people on the planet.
I am very happy to live in Massachusetts. Though “Taxachusetts” is sometimes a painfully valid nickname, our state actually has services to offer its residents. We pay our home-care providers, we give disabled people quality educations and jobs (not quite minimum wage though), and if you need health insurance you will be able to find some. We also support the best universities and public schools on the planet, fostering the kind of intelligence that has allowed us to live such technologically advanced lives. Our state does amazing things with its taxes, which is more than one could say for New Hampshire, Mass’s cranky northern brother that skims tens of thousands of dollars in property taxes from individual homeowners every year and only offers its residents opium addiction and anti-abortion legislation. Hey, at least we can shop up there tax free!
All I’m saying is, the taxes aren’t going away. They just aren’t. Anybody that claims to lower your taxes is lying, or else they are moving your taxes on to somebody else (hint: somebody poorer). So rather than throwing up our hands and letting the politicians pocket our money and walk, why don’t we try to make taxes work for us? If you are going to be taking our money anyway, I better get a tangible good out of it.
Oh wait… somehow this discussion always falls to the small folk, the lower and middle class taxpayers. There does exist in this insane year of our lord 2021 a class of people that wield such an incredible mass of wealth that collecting a few billion from only a handful of them would easily pay a lion’s share in services. How did this happen? There was a point in American history when the stars aligned for the ultra-rich and they finally managed to get a puppet into office. His name was Ronald Reagan, and by his decree our nation was plunged into a forty year+ reign of conservative policies that have allowed levels of wealth inequality to match that of the oil and steel barons of the early 20th century.
Now you are probably thinking, “well shit, if only we had somebody up in the white house willing to consider amending–” WAIT WE DO. Trump is out of office, and Biden’s limping operation, geriatric as it is, has put forth some really straightforward ideas about moving taxes off the working class and onto the tech gods. These measures one-by-one have been shot down, of course–first by republicans and then by democrats. Both are in the pockets of billionaires. Remember the old cave man maxim: “Democrat bad. Republican worse. All lizards.”
The latest attempt to tax billionaires by collecting off their asset gains is novel, temporary, and probably won’t even get off the ground:
“The tax would be levied on anyone with more than $1 billion in assets or more than $100 million in income for three consecutive years — which applies to about 700 people in the United States. Initially, the legislation would impose the capital gains tax — 23.8 percent — on the gain in value of billionaires’ tradable assets, based on the original price of those assets.”
“Billionaires have avoided taxation by paying themselves very low salaries while amassing fortunes in stocks and other assets. They then borrow off those assets to finance their lifestyles, rather than selling the assets and paying capital gains taxes.” -Jonathan Weisman
700 people could give a fraction of their wealth so that we can invest in infrastructure and fix our healthcare, and they won’t. Let that sink in. You should be mad.
Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, has decided that this proposed billionaire tax is unfair:
“‘I [Manchin] don’t like the connotation that we’re targeting different people.” People, he added, that “contributed to society” and “create a lot of jobs and invest a lot of money and give a lot to philanthropic pursuits.'”
Manchin, of course, makes millions in kickbacks from the fossil fuels industry and probably millions more in invisible bribes that we will never know.
Yes, praise be the techies. Our mech overlords, hallowed and merciful, have already done so much for us. We should leave them alone to play with their fancy electric cars and launch rockets while normal people perish in overstocked hospitals and starve in the streets.
Perhaps the Besos’s of America will remember the people that made them. They probably won’t. Never forget that we pay well above our fair share in taxes so they don’t have to. God bless Amazon.
