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Class war being waged in Rhode Island |
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Monday, 26 January 2009 |
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Politics as Usual by Jim Baron It is now abundantly clear that class war is being waged in Rhode Island.
In the state where the Gilded Age tycoons erected their ostentatious “summer cottages,” the forces of the rich are in attack mode — mobilizing their wealth and power and influence to make complete their hegemony over our economic life. Perhaps Rhode Island can be the incubator for their ultimate total takeover of the nation.
They can work out the bugs of plutocracy in Rhode Island, like Liza Minelli previewing her stage show in Woonsocket, then export it to the rest of America. And, of course, tomorrow the world.
We got a peek at the formal Declaration of War last week from Gary Sasse’s tax structure study group.
Their proposal: further shift the tax burden to people making between $30,000 and $110,000 (roughly the working and middle class) and give just about everyone above that a tax break.
Yes, that’s who we want to whack, the people who are struggling just to (barely) get by, the people worried about being laid off and losing their paycheck and health care in one fell swoop, the people fearing the foreclosure of their home if they can’t make the mortgage, the people who by now have just about given up on the idea of being able to pay to send their kids to a decent college.
They deserve a tax increase. We can use their money to reduce the taxes of people in the six-figure-and-up range. They are the ones who deserve relief. (OK, there is a proposal to treat capital gains as regular income, but I would argue that is a fig leaf to cover the naked redistribution of the tax burden inherent in the plan.)
If that proposal even comes close to becoming law, taxpayers should break out the torches and pitchforks and march on Smith Hill, hunting it down and killing it like the monster in a horror movie.
But we do not need to peer into the future to see class war being waged. Governor Carcieri’s supplemental budget is as good a battle plan as any for upper-class warriors to follow.
Just last week I sat in the House Finance Committee hearing room listening as one mayor after another from cities and towns around the state (but with a concentration of them from in and around the blue-collar the Blackstone Valley) testified that the governor’s proposed mid-year state aid cuts would “devastate” their cities and towns.
I put the word devastate in quotes because each and every one of the mayors used that very word to describe the impact they expect the cuts to have on their community.
Pawtucket Mayor James Doyle made no bones about the fact that if the cuts go through as proposed, his city “sure as hell will go bankrupt.” That is not a word used lightly by people with bond ratings to protect. It was a distress signal. A cry for help.
What is the cause of all that municipal woe? The governor’s plan to eliminate — not reduce, not cut back, but eliminate $55 million in general revenue sharing.
Why does that $55 million figure sound so familiar? Oh, I know: in the coming budget year we are going to give over nearly that entire amount – an estimated $54.1 million – to a veritable handful (about 4,400, more than half from out of state, according to the group Ocean State Action) of the state’s absolutely most wealthy taxpayers, the richest of the rich, when we once again ratchet down the so-called Flat Tax. In the current year, $37.2 million is going down the same rathole.
When I asked about Pawtucket going bankrupt as a result of the mid-year cut, the governor’s office said that cities and towns were warned that cuts were coming and they have to “sit down with their unions” and demand cuts and givebacks — salary reductions, higher co-pays for health insurance on reduced or frozen salaries, etc.
So, as I understand it, the guy who collects your garbage, the worker who plows your street, the woman who runs one of the offices at City Hall, the cop on the street and the firefighter you expect to put out the blaze at your house and perhaps save one of your loved ones from an upstairs room, all these people should come to the bargaining table and accept pay cuts and other reductions in their standard of living so almost exactly the same amount of money can be handed back to the state’s uber-rich? Doyle says that will make Pawtucket financially bankrupt; I say it makes the state of Rhode Island morally bankrupt.
I am not talking about taking away the millionaires’ tax relief, mind you. I am not even talking about cutting it back, at all. I am talking about freezing it in place where it is right now “for the duration” of the worldwide economic disaster, to borrow a phrase from World War II.
The governor and legislative leaders have all paid lip service to the notion that the budget crisis demands that “hard choices” must be made.
Well, apparently our leaders don’t consider the choice of freezing the multi-millionaires’ tax break so as not to cripple all 39 of Rhode Island’s cities and towns and the property tax payers who live in them a hard one, because it is pretty obvious nobody in charge is going to make that choice this year. Giving the wealthy a pass at the expense of the rest of us is the easy choice, I guess.
But maybe I shouldn’t carp about the Flat Tax. Because, after all, it is those mega-wealthy folks who benefit from the Flat Tax who start businesses and hire people. If it weren’t for them, Rhode Island wouldn’t be enjoying the low 3-4 percent unemployment rate it now has, with jobs for everyone. What’s that you say? Rhode Island’s unemployment rate is a whopping 10 percent. Gee, maybe those rich guys and gals aren’t using that money to create jobs after all. Maybe they are just jamming it into their pockets, or parking it in tax shelters somewhere, maybe they are just stuffing it in suitcases and flying it to the Cayman Islands. Never mind.
I was browsing the always excellent RI Future blog last week when I came upon a quote by the social activist Saul Alinsky: “Reconciliation means just one thing: When one side gets enough power then the other side gets reconciled to it."
Alinsky would roll over in his grave to see his quote used in this way, but it aptly describes what is happening now in Rhode Island. The rich have amassed their power and wealth to move the state government, and the rest of us seem to be getting reconciled to it.
Shame on us.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 14 February 2009 )
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