Today I will follow up on yesterday’s post where I shared the argument that America’s federal government is too small, not too big and listed the requirements of real freedom.
Heather Cox Richardson in
her post today reported that Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek
plans to cut another 7,000 employees (about 12%) from Social Services even
though their numbers are already at a 50 year low. A common strategy of the
right is to starve an agency for funding to the point where it can no longer provide
the services it was created to do, and then use that as an excuse to privatize
it or just do away with it altogether. That appears to be what is happening
here.
Thom Hartmann wrote today
about the insanity of America having billionaires while one in five American children
go hungry and people resort to crowdfunding to pay for cancer treatment, selling
their life insurance to pay for hospital bills or setting up reverse mortgages
just to survive. He quoted the Center for American Progress:
“America’s hunger crisis is not
due to a lack of food production or scarcity in food supply. Rather, hunger and
food insecurity in the United States are symptoms of policy choices and an
economic system that prioritizes the needs of corporations and the wealthy over
those of the general population.”
Hartmann then pointed out
that the increase in wealth of the four richest Americans averaged $100 billion
each year for the last four years. The cost to end child poverty in America is
estimated at $25 billion. The economic cost to America from child malnutrition
is estimated at $167.5 billion. A 25%
tax on capital gains on just these four people could eliminate child poverty
and save $167 billion. Now that’s efficiency!
At 7% capital gains tax is
already too low, bringing in less than $1 billion in taxes each year, but the
Republicans are trying to repeal it.
Hartmann then explains why,
in a democratic country, Congress repeatedly passes legislation that favors the
wealthy over the majority of the people. He puts much of the blame on three
Supreme Court decisions that legalized bribery of politicians.
In Buckley v Valeo
(1976) the court ruled that limits on campaign spending was unconstitutional
and that the First Amendment on free speech also applies to money. In First National
Bank v Bellotti (1978) the court ruled essentially that corporations are
people with the same right to unlimited campaign spending. These rulings were
supported in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission (2010) which
ruled that laws restricting political spending of corporations and unions are
inconsistent with the First Amendment.
This ruling has opened the
gates to a flood of corporate money, often hidden through organizations, that
have strongly influenced the voting of politicians. They no longer work for their
constituents (including the people that voted for them) but for the billionaires
and corporations that “own” them. As an example, Hartmann points out that Republican
politicians receive so much money from the fossil fuel industry that nearly all
refuse to recognize the reality of climate change.
Hartmann explains this and
much more in his book The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal
of America (2019).
No wonder the middle class
has gotten poorer over the past 4 decades. Since the first Supreme Court
rulings legalizing bribery, $50 trillion of wealth has been redistributed from
the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
Sources:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-8-2025
https://hartmannreport.com/p/americas-sickest-reality-show-crowdfunding
https://www.amazon.com/History-Supreme-Betrayal-America-Hartmann/dp/1523085940/ref=thomhartmann
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
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