Blue Mondays in June
by Tom Sullivan
Mondays are tough enough for most Americans without the added stress of awaiting Supreme Court pronouncements on whether a) the 2020 census will include a citizenship question for all households for the first time in decades, and b) partisan gerrymandering will be declared constitutional. A lot is riding on those with two Mondays left in June. With June 30, 2019 as the nominal “go to print” deadline for census questionnaires, today could be the day for some answer on Department of Commerce v. New York,, the census case (a). No doubt the North Carolina and Maryland gerrymandering decisions (b) will wait a week.
Decisions are due to post at 10 a.m. EDT/ 7 a.m. PDT.
But what am I thinking? Most Americans don't pay much attention to Supreme Court cases. They are too busy working for an economy that doesn't work for them. Who does it work for? But you know already.
Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project examined data from the Federal Reserve and found that from 1989 through 2018 the richest one percent grew their wealth by $21 trillion. Those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution (maybe you) lost $900 billion.
After explaining what those numbers include and exclude, Eric Levitz asks whether this conforms to any American sense of economic justice:
Put differently: Does the average American believe that, over the past three decades, our nation’s richest one percent have contributed roughly $22 trillion more to our collective well-being than the poorest 50 percent have? Does she think that the tens of millions of working-class people who spent the past 30 years cooking other Americans’ dinner, cleaning their toilets, caring for their children, harvesting their crops, ringing up their groceries — and performing the countless other poorly remunerated forms of labor that our society demands — collectively produced an infinitesimal fraction of the value that America’s corporate lawyers, hedge-fund managers, venture capitalists, specialist physicians, heirs and heiresses, and other high-paid professionals did?That was a rather freighted rhetorical question.
But we need not rely on such studies. Real people feel the effects of that inequity on a daily basis. You'll be shocked, shocked to find who benefited (and who did not) from the Trump tax bill. In Connecticut, the Guardian reports, AT&T is laying off workers:
AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, promised in November 2017 to invest $1bn in capital expenditure and create 7,000 new jobs at the company if Trump’s hugely controversial tax cut bill passed. Many opponents had slammed the cuts as a corporate giveaway that benefited the super-rich. But big firms lobbied for it, saying – as AT&T did – that it would fund job-creating expansions.General Motors is laying off workers and closing plants, lending credence to claims by Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, that the tax plan was "a scam, a giant bait-and-switch."
The bill was voted into law in December 2017, reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. AT&T’s benefit was a tax windfall of $21bn and an additional estimated $3bn annually. But instead of creating jobs and increasing investment into the company, AT&T has eliminated 23,328 jobs since the tax cut bill was passed, according to a recent report by the Communications Workers of America. The CWA also said AT&T reduced their capital investments by $1.4bn.
The vision of a lower-tax, lightly regulated economy, which gained ascendancy during the Reagan years, was always defended by its advocates as a bottom-up idea because it extolled the role of the entrepreneur who bravely started a business. If he or she worked hard enough and had something worthy to sell, the business would take off, creating jobs and new opportunities. It’s why Republican politicians argue obsessively that what’s good for “job creators” is good for the rest of us.That's not the way it feels. Ask employees no longer employees at AT&T, at GM, at Wells Fargo.
But this conception of economic life is not really bottom-up; it has little concern about concentrated economic power. Its policies reward those at the top. That’s where the term “trickle down” comes from. Investors and business people are the heroes of this story. The worker owes everything to them.
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.Productivity and growth may matter, but so do people's lives, Dionne insists, "We don’t usually think of the word 'moral' as attached to the word 'economics.' It’s time we started."