Federal Sales Tax

Back in the eighties I tried in my high school social studies classes to explain the difference between people who were living on income from work and people who were enriching themselves by the work of others. One of my activities was to ask the students to create budgets for families with incomes of $35,000 and families with incomes of $135,00. The first was still possible then. In fact it was close to what many of their own families made. The second seemed unimaginably large, to me as well as to them. With that fantasy $135,000 my students were able to splurge on nice homes, fancy cars, restaurants, theater and concert tickets, and elaborate vacations. The $35,000 went for rent, subway tokens, occasional trips to McDonald's and visits to family outside of New York. The realization that everything went to the same set of necessities was the point, because then we imagined a budget for a family making ten million a year. No matter how hard they tried, it was hard to spend more than a small percent of it.

This week the Republicans in Congress once again gutted the budget of the Internal Revenue Service. They have been doing this for decades. As a result, the IRS can't afford to audit the taxes of anybody but the poorest Americans. That is on top of the Reagan-era "reforms" that already lowered taxes on the wealthiest. But this year they also proposed replacing the income tax with a federal sales tax of roughly thirty percent.

We call a tax "progressive" when it increases the bite on those who can most afford it. Taking ten percent, say, from people who earn $50,000 leaves them with only $40,000, which is a significant change in their ability to survive. Taking fifty percent from people whose inheritance yields $10 million a year, on the other hand, still leaves them with a - to me - more-than-adequate $5 million a year.

A flat tax, on the other hand, taxes everybody the same. The Reagan reform called for a flat tax but settled for just dramatically compressing the difference between the highest and lowest tax rates. We call a flat tax "regressive" because it puts an unfair burden on the poor. If we tax everyone 20%, for example, that first family ends up with $30,000, which is unsupportable. But it leaves the rich family with $8 million a year, a gift from the poor of an addition $3 million.

That is what has been going on for the last forty years! Why are we surprised that the gap between the wealthiest Americans and everybody else has grown so much in that time? And they write checks to their representatives in Congress to ask for even more. This is even before we consider the fact that they're not being audited and that the tax code allows them write-offs to avoid paying any taxes at all.

So why did the Republican "Freedom" Caucus also suggest scrapping the income tax completely and replacing it with a 30% federal sales tax? Consider the social and economic arithmetic. The rule of thumb on rents and mortgages used to be that you shouldn't spend more than a quarter of your income on housing. That has been thrown out the window with rising housing costs and the average for working people is now about a third, with many paying even more. Let's pass that by without comment for now. It leaves our first family with $33,000 a year for everything else. If they spend it on necessities (which, of course, they must) it gets taxed, raising the cost to them by another $10,000 a year. However you parse this, it means either cutting their income to $22,000 or raising their expenses to $43,000 that they don't have.

And our second family? Well, again, they're mainly accumulating money; they're not actually spending more that a small percentage of the return on their wealth. consequently, that 30% tax is on a much smaller portion of their income, the part they're using on purchases. Even if we call that an extravagant million, the tax is now $300,000. This is a dramatic reduction (85% less!) even from the $2 million tax bill that we gave them with a very regressive flat tax above. Instead of the poor transferring $3 million a year to this wealthy family, the poor would now be responsible for a gift of almost $5 million.

If a flat income tax puts an unfair burden on those who can least afford it, then a flat sales tax is open robbery by the ultra-rich of everybody else. If a flat income tax is regressive, a federal sales tax is... I don't quite have a word strong enough.

There was never any chance such a sales tax would pass. The twenty Republicans who were holding up Kevin McCarthy's election as Speaker demanded a vote on it as one of the (many) concessions they extracted for their eventual support. He broke that promise immediately. It wouldn't have gained enough votes anyway. It certainly wouldn't have passed the Senate. So why bring it up?

Taking an extreme position and inserting it into the national consciousness is a way of moving the conversation in that direction. Ronald Reagan did not actually get a flat income tax. But by discussing it, our American oligarchs succeeded in changing the tax code to allow them to keep getting richer at our expense. The same strategy is moving us closer to gutting Social Security. Sometimes the tactic is to claim (falsely) that Social Security is bankrupting us. Sometimes it is to point at a bull stock market and con the gullible into thinking they could become rich if only they were investing their money instead of supporting their elders (who similarly supported their own elders throughout their entire working lives.) But whatever the short-term tactic, the long-term strategy is to end Social Security and impoverish the elderly. It may not happen today. It may not even happen totally. But the fact that we are discussing the previously unthinkable makes some part of it, at least, thinkable.

Our American reactionaries have motives of both ideology and greed for wanting to privatize everything, from highways to schools, from health care to policing. Their ideology of selfishness prevents them from seeing that there is any "we" at all. Why should anyone be responsible for anyone else's kids? Why should anyone be responsible for anyone else's medical crisis? But they also see a chance to cash in. House on fire? The privatized fire department pulls out a credit card reader before they connect their hoses and you're on the hook for a bill you simply cannot pay. Isn't that what the hospitals do already?

I write this only for myself, because nobody else will most probably ever see it. But I think about the people who proudly insist that they don't pay attention to politics. The man who encourages you to ignore politics has his hand in your pocket.

The Ban on AP African American History in Florida

 How to understand Florida’s ban on teaching Advanced Placed African American History? By seeing it in the context of other campaigns to enforce ignorance.

Way back in the 1950’s, when the cigarette manufacturers realized that their product was definitely killing people, they immediately began a propaganda campaign to discredit the science, to convince people that it was “debatable” instead of factual. They even made it a political issue with “I Smoke and I Vote!” bumper stickers.

Similarly, when the coal, oil, and natural gas companies realized that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels was, in fact, creating a massive climate crisis, they, too, immediately began a propaganda campaign. They hired ad agencies and fringe researchers to convince people that the existence of climate change was debatable. Then, when that became an untenable position, they pretended that it “wasn’t clear” whether it was caused by fossil-fuel burning instead of some as-yet-unknown “natural” process.

This highly-developed propaganda tactic relies on journalists’ professional obligation to present both sides of a story in order to spread ignorance instead of understanding. The problem is that there are no “two sides” to - for example - the existence of gravity or to the fact that the earth orbits the sun. There are also no “two sides” to whether cigarettes cause cancer or whether burning fossils fuels is causing our obvious climate crisis. These were conscious (and selfish) campaigns to promote ignorance of things that were already known in order to protect profits.

Now we see states passing laws to criminalize teaching in their schools. You read that right: criminalize teaching in schools. Among the best known are Florida’s Stop WOKE Act and Parental Rights Act. The first outlaws teaching that people in this country have been discriminated against because of their race, national origin, or gender! That is not my characterization; that is the language of the law itself. What adult doesn’t know that discrimination is a simple fact of the history of this country? But it is now illegal to teach that fact in Florida, and the law offers bounties to parents who turn their children’s teachers in for teaching that fact.

The second is popularly know as the “Don’t-Say-Gay" Act because it bans any discussion of gender or sexuality in the lower grades. It also forbids counselors and teachers in the upper grades from having conversations in confidence with individual students who want to talk about their sexuality or gender identity. It, too, offers bounties to parents who turn in their children’s teachers.

These Florida laws, and those like them in other states, go well beyond pretending that the existence of racism in the US (and the existence of different sexual orientations among human beings, always and everywhere) is controversial instead of factual. These laws criminalize teaching those facts. They represent an effort to outlaw the study of history and humanity. They say that the teaching of simple truth represents indoctrination and (that new favorite word of homophobes) “grooming.”

If there is anything positive about this horror it is the desperation it reveals. White supremacy tells on itself when frightened white parents say that don’t want their children to be traumatized by merely hearing about the dangers and indignities Black, Indigenous, Asian, and other historically-colonized people actually experience to this day. When Florida bans an advanced placement course from ETS they are working to keep information from the privileged children who are most likely to take those classes. The legislators aren’t just suppressing knowledge from the children of poor and working people; they are aggressively keeping it from their own children and the children of their wealthy donors. Hidden in this desperation is the fear that even the children of wealthy white families, recipients of all the privileges of racial capitalism, may turn against this oppressive and exploitive system if they learn how it works. 

We have to fight for the truth and fight for the obligation to teach the truth in the schools. We have to teach the truth to generations of teachers who never learned it when they were students and who suspect that it is historical “revisionism,” another of their scare words. And we have to challenge ourselves to learn it, too, instead of just treating the Stop WOKE and “Don’t-Say-Gay” Acts as just two more Florida Man jokes.