The bourgeoisie hyper exploits workers, extracting their surplus value, then has their government extract more of the leftovers, by taxing personal income. Even after that, the ruling class wants you to pay more.
Why? Because 47% of workers pay no personal income tax, and yet enjoy the ‘benefits’ of bourgeois government…for free! For the haute bourgeoisie like former presidential candidate billionaire Mitt Romney and their ideological functionaries, this is alarming. If trends continue, “folks paying the bill would find themselves in a very uncomfortable situation—essentially living life as milking cows for the rest of society.” Oh, my! The plight of poor ‘folks’ like Romney!
Cry me a river!
Who is doing the milking? "The Tax Policy Center estimates that last year nearly 107 million households, or about 61 percent, owed no income tax or even received tax credits from the government," Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, noted last week. "The share of non-payers will decline to about 102 million or 57 percent this year."
"The percentage of filers with no income liability has generally increased from where it was nearly 40 years ago," the National Taxpayers Union Foundation reported in 2018. "This trend is indicative of a progressive income tax code under which higher-income earners pay a larger share of taxes while low-income earners are generally shielded from significant income tax liabilities." How about this solution: have ‘folks’ like billionaire Romney pay more to workers, so they have enough income worth taxing!
Actually, there are many other taxes, which don’t involve personal income tax, which workers do pay. Households pay federal taxes on gasoline, beer and cigarettes. And then there are state and local sales, property and income taxes — all of which are often less progressive than the federal income tax. Putting all these together, a family of three with an income of $30,000 would owe no federal income tax (in fact, they would get money back). But they could easily pay more than $4,500, or 15 percent of their income, in taxes. Ok, but those taxes aren’t going to the Federal bourgeois government…why is that important?
It’s because the bourgeoisie and the military industrial complex are co dependents in the US imperialist system and have been since WWII. The bourgeoisie and their ideological functionaries in acamedia like to whip up nationalism—they want the population to feel ‘we’re all in this together!’ But follow the money. The bourgeoisie owns all of it. In the first quarter of 2021, the increasingly unequal share of net wealth in the United States held by the top 10 percent increased from the previous quarter to 69.8 percent. At the beginning of 1990, this figure stood at 60.5 percent.
The bourgeoisie need a military industrial complex to defend all that stuff, and to gain more economic territory and hyper exploit more workers abroad. That’s why the US spends more on ‘defense’ than the next 11 countries like Russia, China, the UK, etc. combined.
The upshot is the bourgeoisie should pay more, a lot more, because they’re paying for a military industrial complex to a) protect their stuff and b) beat up resistance around the world so they can take others’ stuff—newsflash: that $300 million per day for the military industrial complex in Afghanistan for the last 20 years isn’t coming back to shore up Social Security!
So if you hear the ruling class lives like ‘milking cows’ for the rest of us, now you’ll be in on who the real maids are doing the milking.
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According to PetSmart, today is National Dog Day. See my August 22, 2021 substack for more thoughts on this subject!
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Aug 26, 1921… workers in the mills and bakeries declared a soviet (aka: a workers' council) in Bruree, Ireland. A rare photograph features a sign workers affixed to one of the mills, reading "Bruree Soviet Workers Mills. We make bread not profits."
Notes
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/covid-19-pandemic-drove-huge-temporary-increase-households-did-not-pay-federal-income-tax
https://reason.com/2021/08/23/the-pandemic-has-most-americans-paying-no-federal-income-taxes/?utm_medium=email
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/26506/901527-Five-Myths-About-the-Percent.pdf
https://thehill.com/video/campaign/251179-new-obama-tv-ad-hits-romney-over-47-percent-remark-taxes
https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison#:~:text=Defense%20spending%20accounts%20for%20more,of%20the%20annual%20federal%20budget.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/299460/distribution-of-wealth-in-the-united-states/#:~:text=In%20the%20first%20quarter%20of,figure%20stood%20at%2060.5%20percent.
h/t working class history…great twitter follow