| CURRENT WEATHER: Clear, 50° |
|
|
|
||
|
||||
|
February 18, 2004
And just what did you do in the class war, Senator?
There were those who, concerned more with party credentials than the public interest, challenged Clark's right to run as a Democrat. At candidate debates he was asked to justify his recent decision to be a party member. But what defined Clark as a Democrat was not longevity of membership but fidelity of principle. There was a time when tax fairness virtually defined the Democratic Party. It no longer does. The party is so wired into corporate corruption that it is a betrayal of everything for which it once stood. If a Democrat steps out of line long enough to support the poor and middle class, she or he is likely to be attacked by "leaders" like Joe Lieberman, who last year attacked Al Gore for Gore's halfhearted economic populism. Clark tried to reverse that. Where other candidates tinkered with tax "reform" (every screwing of the public in the last 40 years has been done in the name of tax reform) he proposed a bold stroke to "restore progressivity to the tax system." A family of four with an income of up to $50,000 a year would have been exempted from the income tax altogether. A single parent with one child making up to $28,000 a year would also have been exempted (with a sliding scale to cover other circumstances). The revenue lost would have been recovered by reversing the trend of cutting taxes paid by the rich. Clark would have increased taxes on the one percent of taxpayers at the top. This was, indeed, a restoration. When the income tax was created in 1913 under grass roots pressure for a fairer form of taxation, it was assumed the income tax would be progressive - taxing the rich more heavily than the poor. And that's the way it started. In 1913 single people making $3,000 a year and married couples making $4,000 (a figure equivalent to $58,000 in 1994 dollars) a year were exempt from income taxes - they didn't even have to file a return. Then the wealthy, their lobbyists, and their accountants went to work. Congress started chipping away at the progressivism of income taxes through loopholes, deductions, indexing, exemptions, and all the other parlor tricks that have changed "income tax" from a popular mechanism for fairness to a despised expletive. And the Democrats have been chief conspirators. In the past 40 years, during which Democrats were usually calling the shots in Congress, the top tax rate has been lowered repeatedly and special interest tax breaks handed out to Democratic sugar daddies. But even that isn't the real story. The tax rate is irrelevant. The top tax rate can be a confiscatory 100 percent and the rich would end up paying little because of all those parlor tricks. And because of the Democrats' leadership against the poor (and their collaboration with Republicans in years of GOP congressional majorities), the debate on tax measures is always unbalanced and lopsided because today's counterfeit Democrats have lost their predecessors' skill and deftness in taking on the big boys. They inevitably cower before Republican claims that by asking for fairness, the Democrats are engaging in class warfare. The two-time Pulitzer winning investigative reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele, who specialize in exposing the soak-the-poor-and-middle-class features of the tax system, have made a career out of bringing these tawdry mechanisms to light. "Over time, much of the debate concerning tax rates would boil down to two phrases," Barlett and Steele have written. "Tax legislation that would increase the rate on the wealthy was called 'class welfare.' Tax legislation that would reduce the rate on the wealthy was called 'tax reform'." The way the Democratic Party has been gelded by power and money can be seen in a tax break written into the Internal Revenue Code for a company incorporated here in Nevada. The code exempts from taxation much of the income of any company "which is part of an affiliated group which files a consolidated federal income tax return, the common parent of which was incorporated in Nevada on January 27, 1972 ..." There's only one company in the world that fits this description - Cantor, Fitzgerald and Company Inc., a corporation which (get this) helps other corporations avoid paying taxes. The language in the tax code was tailored specifically to benefit this one company, and a Democratic senator, Pat Moynihan, sponsored it. (We have Barlett and Steele to thank for bringing this to light. Reporters used to do such reporting all the time. Now we cover "news you can use" and dangerous Super Bowl dancers.) Or there is the fact that the earnings of stock market shares are taxed at a 14 percent rate while the earnings of savings accounts are taxed at a 28 percent rate. The tax code is shot through with these kinds of loopholes, thanks to the Democratic Party, which in the war on the poor has gone over to the other side, rejecting the view that money made by money should be taxed at the same rate as money made by workers. Remember that this fall when we see the imitation Democrats chasing after corporate campaign "contributions" while trying hard to forget Wesley Clark, who made the mistake of reminding them of what a real Democrat represents. (Myers is a veteran capital reporter. His column, "Against the Grain," appears here on Wednesdays.) |
