TBA IN THE MEDIA

GUEST VIEWPOINT

Low-tax, low-wage ideology hurts the middle class

 

By Rick Staggenborg

For The Register-Guard

DEC 17, 2015

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Proposals by Lane County and the city of Eugene to increase wages have raised predictable complaints. These implicitly argue that using government power to ensure that those who work for us receive a living wage is less important than equalizing suffering in the declining American economy’s race to the bottom. In other words, if private-sector workers are victims of the cult of free market ideology, then public-sector workers should suffer proportionately.

While this is one definition of fairness, it fails to consider that we the people have the power to set the rules in the workplace so that no one has to work full time for less than a living wage.

That is one of the little-appreciated blessings of democracy. It just requires abandoning blind ideology, taking a look at what has worked in the past, and ­asking what has changed.

For the first time in history, America’s children face the prospect of a declining standard of living. While retired Americans are among the most economically secure in history, they too are facing mounting economic challenges.

Yet instead of acknowledging that something is drastically wrong with the way that the economy is now structured, those who have gotten their slice of the pie prefer to blame the problem on “laziness,” not recognizing that younger generations have been stripped of many of the opportunities they enjoy. Sadly, they are much more likely to vote than are young people disillusioned by a political process designed to serve the interests of those least in need. However, those who vote solely according to their perceived self-interest fail to realize that what is best for them is what is best for workers, the backbone of the economy.

In treating human labor as a commodity, free market dogmatists assume that its “optimum value” should be determined by impersonal market forces. Those who worship this ideology define “freedom” as the freedom to get rich without government interference, without recognizing that in the face of increasing wealth inequality, this is a freedom shared by a dwindling group of fortunate Americans. As a result, the ranks of the working poor and unemployed are growing and all but the wealthiest Americans are paying for it.

The free market has shipped jobs overseas, thanks to politicians whose campaigns are financed by the highest bidders for their services. Is this really what we want? These politicians and the corporate media tell us that because globalization is inevitable, so are free trade agreements that break down barriers meant to protect American workers and the general public from having to compete with Third World wages, taxes and lax environmental standards.

The reality is that multinational corporations gain profits and avoid taxes while workers lose, further reducing the tax revenues upon which a functioning society depends. Raising barriers to unfair trade and increasing wages and tax rates on corporations and wealthy Americans does not have to hurt the economy. If that were true, then ours should be the most prosperous generation since the 1940s, because we have far fewer trade barriers and much lower individual and corporate tax rates now.

In fact, it was higher wages and a more equal tax burden that led to the unparalleled prosperity of the 1940s through the ’80s. The booming economy meant workers had money in their pockets, and they could afford to buy products made in America. Single wage earners could support families and send their kids to college, with government assistance. Workers did not have to choose between housing, food and medicine as they do now. They retired on pensions.

Having lost all this to the cult of the free market, it is insane to attribute America’s economic decline to “socialism.”

If you believe that every tax is destructive to the economy, you would have to unrealistically conclude that we are better off now than in America’s economic Golden Age. The difference between then and now is how taxes are raised and spent. We could choose to slash the bloated military, reform the tax system to work for all of us, and spend the revenue to strengthen the U.S. economic and social infrastructure if we chose to value human dignity over failed free market ideology.

Rick Staggenborg of Coos Bay is board president of Take Back America for the People, a 501.c3 organization.