The following is a letter I wrote in response to my Congressman’s letter to me about legislation to offset the 1.9 Trillion Republicans just added to the U.S. deficit.
Dear Congressman Schweikert:
After reviewing your letter to me dated May 22, 2018, I have a few comments about the topic of entitlements, the federal budget, and the fiscal health of our country.
The most obvious point I want to make is that republicans in Congress created the debt & deficit situation we find ourselves in. When President Trump signed the final version of The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, you knew or should have known that the law would increase the deficit by approximately 1.9 trillion over the next decade.
That’s the problem you and your colleagues are now grappling with, trying to figure out how you can offset that fiscal catastrophe you created. It’s fairly well known, or you could say common knowledge, that republicans will use this looming deficit they created to convince voters there is no choice but to cut back on and privatize entitlements.
If that is the plan, to reduce and privatize entitlements as the principle means of offsetting the enormous deficit republicans created for no legitimate reason, you probably shouldn’t count on remaining in Congress much longer. The republican political machine of disinformation has done a terrific job of rallying a certain group of people to emotionally invest in their own economic destruction. But eventually people do catch on.
If you intend to go ahead with a plan that will unequivocally further impoverish middle America, you should understand that you are backing middle America into a corner economically. When people begin to realize the full impact of the tax debacle and then comes entitlement cut backs on top of losing healthcare subsidies, (because I’m pretty sure that’s the plan), what do they need you and your colleagues for? What good are you for the middle class? The middle class is what really counts. They are the people you ultimately serve. Oh, right now republicans are serving only the wealthy, but that won’t last. I did take a couple of courses in economics when I was in college and one thing I clearly remember from them is that a nation is only as strong and stable as its middle class is.
In other words, and I’m sure this isn’t news to you, if our middle class or the majority of citizens are upwardly mobile, if they can work hard and afford to send their kids to college and save some money for retirement and have a reasonable expectation of being able to pay their bills, that’s pretty much all they want or expect. In fact, that’s how America became the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world! A stable, upwardly mobile middle class makes a stable economy and a stable nation. To be clear, that is what is at stake.
So my suggestion to you is that instead of looking to squeeze more money out of the middle class, you should look at other possibilities. In my opinion it would be political suicide to attempt to justify taking more money away from an already personally fiscally stressed middle class. We have barely recovered from the fiscal free fall that began in 2008 for goodness sake! The uncertainty about what would happen to the American economy at that time isn’t something average Americans are likely to soon forget, and the disinformation campaign won’t work as well over time. People will catch on and the reality of spending their working lives serving the rich will be hard to ignore, even at a Trump rally.
Nowhere is it written that when Congress needs more federal income to fix a fiscal problem they created that the extra income must come from the middle class. But that seems to be the assumption you are working with. There are a lot of ways to boost federal income without hurting the majority of Americans. All you have to do is look at the options laid out on the CBO website.
Here are a few that won’t severely affect most Americans:
Impose a tax on emissions of greenhouse gases, impose a tax on financial investment transactions, impose a tax on overland freight transport, impose a fee on large financial institutions, further limit the deduction of interest expense for multinational corporations, increase excise taxes on motor fuels by 35 cents and index for inflation, raise the tax rates on long-term capital gains and qualified dividends by 2 percentage points, require a minimum level of taxation of foreign income as it is earned, repeal certain tax preferences for energy and natural resource-based industries, subject all publicly traded partnerships to the corporate income tax rate, tax carried interest at ordinary income rates, tax world-wide income of U.S. corporations as it is earned, defer interest deductions related to deferred income, reinstate superfund taxes, build only one type of nuclear weapon for bombers (because nuclear weapons should never be used anyway.) reduce the number of ballistic missile submarines, and many more. To all of the foregoing I suggest that the billions of dollars we give in annual industry subsidies should be re-evaluated and reduced or discontinued. Voters have no real input on industry subsidies yet it is their money being given away.
As you can see the items I listed are things that can be implemented without further burdening average Americans because that should be your and your colleagues’ goal.
Cordially,
Susan Benton