VTMBH Article: Body
With the budget deal done, politicians in the city have time to catch their breath after the election and post-election blur combined with the budget process. The freshmen on the city council saw what numbers look like in the real world, and were happy just to get through it, saving whatever they could, and promising to sort it all out further down the road. Well, theyve got a short run to a nasty stretch of the economic highway, and the only way to straighten it out is by changing the way taxes are raised and by the electorate becoming militant and force the changes needed.
Mayor Bloombergs nickel-and-dime cell phone tax, cigarette tax, parking violations tax and others like them, are poppycock and a lot worse. These regressive taxes strike the middle class and the least among us the hardest. A $25,000-a-year smoker talking on a cell phone about the parking ticket he or she just found on the windshield will be paying a measurable percentage of their yearly income in new taxes. However, the impact on a billionaire like Bloomberg, whose $25,000 rate is measured in the sweep of the second hand, would be akin to removing a grain of sand from Riis Beach.
The problem with the budget will not be solved by taking more and more from people who have less and less. It will be solved when the upper classes pay their fair share. This is something they avoid like a plague.
The New York Times reports how the big accounting firms have private sessions with very wealthy people doing workarounds on the tax code. One example they use is someone with a $20 million paycheck on which he would owe $7.7 million in federal income taxestypically, an executive, professional athlete or entertainerwould delay the tax for 30 years, effectively reducing the tax to $1.4 million. Another example is someone selling a business for a $100 million profit on which there could be $20 million in federal capital-gains taxes alone could instead pay only about $5 million. And that money would go not to the government but to Ernst & Young, as a fee. Rich people play the system to pay less than their fair share. Yet they still demand every service, convenience and courtesy.
People on a payroll dont have this luxury. Taxes are deducted both automatically from their checks, and then paid again at the point of purchase. In return, their relationship with city government usually involves long lines and waiting for the opportunity to have an emergency application for assistance placed on the eight-inch stack of applications waiting to be processed.
And to add further insult, the ruling classesthose in the top 1 percent of wealthmake the middle and lower classes pay for the war machine they use to lash the rest of the world into line.
You look at this elite, impervious to pleas, lacking even the common human decency of allowing universal health care, as in the rest of the industrialized world, or enough money for each student to have enriching and empowering school years, and you wonder what kind of people are these?
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, written by himself, provides us with an answer. When you see a slaveholders nature unrestrained by law or even civility, you see in highest relief, that curious streak that holds money more valuable than human lives.
Brooklyn historian William Mackey, Jr. has written the introduction to a recent release of the narrative, and gave us a copy. To read Mr. Douglasss work is to be inside a slaves skin and finding it nothing like Gone With the Wind. The lives of the people Douglass describes are not much different than cattle, except more poorly treated. [Editor's note: <a href="http://www.ourtimepress.com"> read Douglass' speech by clicking here. </a>]
For Douglass, the key to the doorway out of slavery was learning how to read. This was knowledge he had to steal, letter by letter, coaxing it out of the world around him. His efforts make this book required reading in any curriculum for African-American students, if not in school, then at home.
And it is in the home that we will have to find and build others like Frederick Douglass: those with tenacious and indomitable spirits that will not be bound or held back. They have demonstrated throughout history that change can come. The Berlin Wall can be torn down, the Shah can be run out of Iran, the USSR can be broken up and the ruling elite in the United States can be taken down.
As black and brown people and progressive and middle-class whites come together, they will find that their interests in war and peace, globalization, education and health care, all come together in a Gordian knot, requiring only a sword of fairness in the hands of a united people.
Mayor Bloombergs nickel-and-dime cell phone tax, cigarette tax, parking violations tax and others like them, are poppycock and a lot worse. These regressive taxes strike the middle class and the least among us the hardest. A $25,000-a-year smoker talking on a cell phone about the parking ticket he or she just found on the windshield will be paying a measurable percentage of their yearly income in new taxes. However, the impact on a billionaire like Bloomberg, whose $25,000 rate is measured in the sweep of the second hand, would be akin to removing a grain of sand from Riis Beach.
The problem with the budget will not be solved by taking more and more from people who have less and less. It will be solved when the upper classes pay their fair share. This is something they avoid like a plague.
The New York Times reports how the big accounting firms have private sessions with very wealthy people doing workarounds on the tax code. One example they use is someone with a $20 million paycheck on which he would owe $7.7 million in federal income taxestypically, an executive, professional athlete or entertainerwould delay the tax for 30 years, effectively reducing the tax to $1.4 million. Another example is someone selling a business for a $100 million profit on which there could be $20 million in federal capital-gains taxes alone could instead pay only about $5 million. And that money would go not to the government but to Ernst & Young, as a fee. Rich people play the system to pay less than their fair share. Yet they still demand every service, convenience and courtesy.
People on a payroll dont have this luxury. Taxes are deducted both automatically from their checks, and then paid again at the point of purchase. In return, their relationship with city government usually involves long lines and waiting for the opportunity to have an emergency application for assistance placed on the eight-inch stack of applications waiting to be processed.
And to add further insult, the ruling classesthose in the top 1 percent of wealthmake the middle and lower classes pay for the war machine they use to lash the rest of the world into line.
You look at this elite, impervious to pleas, lacking even the common human decency of allowing universal health care, as in the rest of the industrialized world, or enough money for each student to have enriching and empowering school years, and you wonder what kind of people are these?
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, written by himself, provides us with an answer. When you see a slaveholders nature unrestrained by law or even civility, you see in highest relief, that curious streak that holds money more valuable than human lives.
Brooklyn historian William Mackey, Jr. has written the introduction to a recent release of the narrative, and gave us a copy. To read Mr. Douglasss work is to be inside a slaves skin and finding it nothing like Gone With the Wind. The lives of the people Douglass describes are not much different than cattle, except more poorly treated. [Editor's note: <a href="http://www.ourtimepress.com"> read Douglass' speech by clicking here. </a>]
For Douglass, the key to the doorway out of slavery was learning how to read. This was knowledge he had to steal, letter by letter, coaxing it out of the world around him. His efforts make this book required reading in any curriculum for African-American students, if not in school, then at home.
And it is in the home that we will have to find and build others like Frederick Douglass: those with tenacious and indomitable spirits that will not be bound or held back. They have demonstrated throughout history that change can come. The Berlin Wall can be torn down, the Shah can be run out of Iran, the USSR can be broken up and the ruling elite in the United States can be taken down.
As black and brown people and progressive and middle-class whites come together, they will find that their interests in war and peace, globalization, education and health care, all come together in a Gordian knot, requiring only a sword of fairness in the hands of a united people.