Upper Class Welfare

While watching CSPAN the other day, a women from Palmdale, California called in and cheerfully announced that the American people and particularly American workers are better off when the Republicans are in power in Washington D.C. According to Palmdale Patty, calling from her trailer park, Republicans cut welfare programs thereby freeing up huge sums of money. These monies are then returned to the American workers in the form reduced taxes. Three cheers for Republicans in power?

As an AM radio “Dittohead,” poor Palmdale Patty is parroting Republican Party propaganda perpetuating their perverse prevarications. Meanwhile behind the gated compounds of the rich and famous, Brentwood Buffy and her hubby, Skippy, toast each other with outstretched pinky fingers and laughingly exclaim, “Isn’t class warfare wonderful!”

Poor ignorant Palmdale Patty has to pay an extra $250 per year to feed her family because the Federal Government gives agribusiness $18 billion per year in profit subsidies.

Poor ignorant Palmdale Patty is clueless about Federal Government profit subsidies to the timber industry. Louisiana Pacific, Weyerhauser, and their buddies get checks from the tax payer to the tune of $427 million per year (guess who pays for those thousands of miles of timber roads in the National Forests and, to boot, gives away the trees?).

Poor Palmdale Patty thinks the rich pay their fair share of Social Security taxes. She doesn’t know the more money you make the less Social Security taxes you have to pay. If you make $50,000 per year, you pay 8% of your income in Social Security taxes. If you make $500,000 per year, you pay 1% of your income in Social Security taxes. The rich stiff middle and working class tax payer in the form of a regressive Social Security tax inequities a whopping $53 billion per year. The total cost to Social Security since the Reagan/Bush “reform” is about $800 billion. It was Reagan/Bush and the demopublicans who created the so-called Social Security crisis. Lets ask poor Palmdale Patty if she wants to add Ronnie to Mount Rushmore now.

Corporate and upper class welfare in 1996 amounted to more than $440 billion per year, and that number has grown substantially in the last 5 years. Meanwhile, before that demopublican known as Bill Clinton cut welfare “as we know it” in 1996, the Federal Government spent a miserly $130 billion on the poor/working class and middle class subsidies. If only Palmdale Patty really knew what was going on.

Speaking before the National Press Club in Washington DC, Bill Moyer recently said, “My world view was really shaped by Theodore Roosevelt, who got it right about power in America. Roosevelt thought the central fact of his era was that economic power had become so centralized and dominant it could chew up democracy and spit it out. The power of corporations, he said, had to be balanced in the interest of the general public. Otherwise, America would undergo a class war, the rich would win it, and we wouldn't recognize our country anymore. Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government. The White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary reflect their interests. We appear to have a government run by remote control from the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. To hell with everyone else.” Amen, Mr. Moyer!

June 2001