Last Monday, President Obama called for the wealthiest of Americans to begin paying higher taxes in an effort to reduce our growing federal deficits. House GOP representatives have responded by labeling the President’s intentions as blatant class-warfare. While I agree with the sentiment of the GOP, I also believe the class war began long ago; the middle- and working-class among us have already lost this war. For us, we are too weak, too tired, and too few. It’s time to throw in the towel, and try to live our lives with some dignity.
It’s understandable that some would think I’m being politically nihilistic; however, an un-unified middle-class has little capacity to make effective political change. For starters, Americans are easily influenced by opinions regardless of their factual nature.
Let’s consider a heavyweight: Evolution.
In February of 2009, a Gallup Poll asked this question: “Do you, personally, believe in the theory of evolution, do you not believe in evolution, or don’t you have an opinion either way?” How many said they believed in evolution? Thirty-nine percent. There is a musing I like to put on my name badge at work: “Gravity is just a theory.” My point? We know more about evolutionary theory than we do about gravitation, yet most Americans are still in the dark ages when it comes to fundamentals in science. This is the failing of American educations; we serve religiosity over science, and thus we have failed generations of students. They are not armed with the capacity to think critically about information they receive on a daily basis. The scariest implication of this statistic is that it becomes clear that regardless of the overwhelming amount of data and scientific understanding presented, a large part of this country will quake at the shaking hand of god, and in doing so sacrifice progress for a pew. Any snake-oil salesmen with the fervor and step to influence such a voting block is powerful, indeed.
Yet, your snake-oil salesmen also have a lot of airtime to work with. Consider the 2010 Supreme Court decision “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.” This landmark decision prevents the United States government from limiting corporate funding of independent political broadcasts during candidate elections. This means that a corporation, let’s say Phillip Morris, can, without limit, run a smear campaign against President Obama in this next Presidential campaign without any limits on the expenditure. While the decision left much of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act – which bans donations of soft money to political campaigns – intact, it leaves the future of American democracy vulnerable.
Justice Stevens said it best in his recent statement that this ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation…While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.” In an age where voters are so readily influenced by advertising, media, and public opinion, it is clear we have sold our interest in this country to the bottomless coffers of the American corporation.
With an uneducated and easily influenced middle-class, we can’t call for the political change required to advance the cause of American democracy. Consider our energy policy. Nothing is more important to the long-term economic and military security of the United States than the reduction of our dependence on petroleum-based energy. The United States provides tax incentives for oil companies such that their effective tax rate is only about 9 percent; compare this to the average corporate tax rate of 25 percent. Moreover, the ten largest oil companies in the world all exist in regions with some degree of political instability. Why do I bring this up? I need to know why we have not yet switched to hydrogen. Forget fuel cells, we can wait, as Hydrogen fuel for combustion engines is a viable idea now.
The United States has less than 1.5 percent of the world’s known oil reserves, yet we have almost 20,000 kilometers of coastline. Through use of solar energy and tidal and wind turbines, hydrogen fuel is easily produced. (If electrolysis is a foreign concept to you, try doing a Wikipedia search.) Hydrogen is domestic, it’s not influenced by war or cartels, and it’s abundant. This makes for cheaper goods and daily commutes, more on the table and less in the tank, important things to the success of the middle class. Yet we empower corporations – by poorly educating our voters and allowing corporate interests to influence the way we vote – to dictate their expenses, their taxes, and their profits. Corporations, especially those in the energy sector, are the decisions makers; we’ve given them the keys and they’re not easily taken back.
This corporate hand festers in the halls of Congress, as well. We are deceived into believing “Starve the Beast” style economic policies are fiscally viable, policies that embolden the wealthiest of Americans and reduce citizen protections, all of which are deepening our federal debt and widening class divides.
We’ve all heard the rhetoric: balance the budget, cut taxes, and reduce spending. The sad news is that as much as Speaker Boehner tells us we can reduce the size of government and deficits by cutting spending, it’s simply not possible. Such talking points from the GOP are silly and stupid.
The 2012 US Government budget estimates total receipts of $2.627 trillion, with total spending of $3.729 trillion. The resulting estimated deficit is $1.101 trillion, which will bring our federal debt to nearly $16 trillion by the end of 2012 – greater than our projected GDP, I might add. Yet, we need to balance the budget, cut taxes, and cut spending. Without cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment or Welfare – we’re trying to avoid class-war, remember – the only budget cuts available to us are in discretionary and defense spending. By shutting down government, about $0.512 trillion, and removing any means of defending ourselves, $0.823 trillion, we can create a budget surplus in this country of $234 billion a year. Yet at that rate, it would take nearly 70 years to eliminate the federal debt.
Making fiscal progress is impossible without raising taxes, and the only wise way to do it is to raise taxes on those who can most afford it, class-war or no. However, the middle-class will never have the power or influence to bring back the top-tier tax rates we saw before President G.W. Bush or President Reagan. We’ve been set against each other since before the signing of the Constitution.
We are all each other’s enemy. Any good social theorist can tell you that the best way to keep an enemy at bay is to have the enemy fight itself. That is to say, instead of striking a class-war against the American aristocracy, we inter-fight between races, genders, nationalities, etc. Politicians use this to win elections. Recall that President Bush passionately fought for a federal amendment against gay marriage to distract the two-thirds of Americans who believed we went into Iraq on false pretenses and all while the US housing bubble boiling up beneath his feet. Racism, sexism, homophobia, any prejudice, is a tool of the economic elite to maintain the status quo. The 2004 Presidential contest was a prime example of how the right use of prejudice can be used to influence the results of an election. Simply, hate wins votes.
The “coming” class war will be lost; it has for a long time. We’ve been far too busy fighting amongst ourselves: a race war, a holy war, wars for justice and democracy, so we’re told. A part of me wants to believe that we’re not all that naïve or ignorant. We should hope for doubt in our capitulation. Maybe there are enough of us that believe in an American that puts equity and progress before hedonism, greed, and power… probably not.
So my friends, grab a white flag, hang it high and hang it proud. We are the middle-class. We concede.
Christopher Dunay is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
