To the Editor:
As the headlines say almost every day, the U.S. is on the brink of bankruptcy, which means that the U.S. government will be unable to pay the obligations that our federal government has incurred with the approval of both Republicans and Democrats in the past.
The debt ceiling must be raised to approve funds to pay them. It has very little to do with future budgets except that Republicans want to use the possibility of default to limit certain spending in the future. Normally, that is how yearly or bi-yearly budgets are hammered out, but the Republicans want to do it now instead of going through the usual process.
But there are two sides to the debt issue. One side is spending; the other side is revenue. The Republicans have flatly stated that any new taxes are out of the question and will be rejected.
Biden and the Democrats want to see higher taxes on the wealthiest members of our society – not taxes on the middle class, and tax rates that are not as high on the rich as those while Reagan was president, but the Republicans are still adamant. No higher taxes on the wealthy.
So, before deciding that issue, let’s take a brief look at who the wealthy are. A prime example right now is the CEO of The Blackstone Group, Stephen Schwarzman. Last year (2022), he took home $1.27 billion in income. You read that correctly. One man took home over $1 billion dollars in one year.
To put that in perspective, that $1 billion would have allowed him to give $10,000 away to each of 100,000 poor families, and he would still have a mere $270 million left for bread, gas, and incidentals. And that’s just for last year’s income, which he would add to the $30 billion he already had.
I think that I should mention that he is on record for pushing lower income taxes. And, he is, as you might guess, a Republican.
My point is that in all the debt ceiling negotiations, Republicans seem to want to bargain to drive our nation into default unless there are cuts for Medicaid payments and food supplements for the poor, and make work requirements for the homeless, helpless and indigent, but don’t feel that the rich 1%, which makes 22% of all income in the country or about $4 trillion annually, or the top .1 of 1% (the one out of a thousand) who take home 5% of all U.S. income, should pay more.
In short, the Republican Party is the protector of the rich and the enemy of the pretty much everyone else on taxation.
Even more interesting is that the major Republican base is not the rich; it’s primarily white people without college educations, who, interestingly enough, are the ones who benefit least from this Republican Party.
