The architects of the New Austerity in the United States want to cut social programs and to maintain the Bush-era tax cuts. What if we move in the other direction and propose a “reasonable” austerity program, one that increases taxes on individuals and institutions in a position to pay more?
Rick Wolff proposes just such an alternative austerity program:
Serious efforts to collect income taxes from US-based multinational corporations, especially those who use internal pricing mechanisms to escape US taxation, would generate vast new federal revenues. The same applies to wealthy individuals. The US has no federal property tax on holdings of stocks, bonds, and cash accounts (states and localities levy no such property taxes either). If the federal government levied a 1 per cent tax on assets between $100,000 to 499,000, and 1.5 per cent on assets above $500,000, that would raise much new federal revenue (everyone’s first $100,000 could be exempted just as the existing US income tax exempts the first few thousands of dollars of individual incomes). Exiting the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters would do likewise. Ending tax exemptions for super-rich private educational institutions (Harvard, Yale, etc.) and for religious institutions (church-goers would then need to pay the costs of their churches) would be among the many other such alternative “reasonable” austerity measures.
Wolff moves the debate in the right direction, away from spending cuts and toward new sources of revenue.
As it turns out, vast majorities of those polled—in the United States, as well as in Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany—support the idea of making the rich contribute more than the less well-off. Here are the numbers:
According to the same poll, similar majorities believe that public spending cuts are necessary to help long term economic recovery.
Clearly, proponents of the New Austerity have managed to turn the terms of debate about deficits in their favor. Now’s the time to reverse the debate and move it in a more reasonable direction.
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