The Lucky Poor?

Jesse (h/t nc links):

The fortunate are indignant that the working poor, and the poor themselves, are paying so little in income taxes on the whole. And this is true, if one measures it by actual federal income tax receipts alone.

It is less so if one considers all the other taxes that add up, like sales taxes and gasoline taxes, and fees.

But even further, I contend that the poor are being taxed to death, by a rotten, corrupt crony capitalist economic system.

The tax may not be levied by the IRS, but it is set down by the system itself. It is set down by the banks that cheat them, by the powerful corporations that use the law for their own excessive profits to exploit them.

They are taxed by those who exploit and cheat them and collect their unjust rents, not because they are smart and hard working, but because they can.  They have carefully positioned themselves to do so.

The poor are taxed by sickness, and a healthcare system with insanely different classes of treatment and payments, and extractive and the predatory practices of pharma-healthcare trusts.

They are taxed by the accidents and tragedies of life, that if one is rich or comes from privilege are not a lasting problem, but if one is not, there is no second chance. One is held in debt bondage, forever.

And when it comes to it, it is the poor who predominantly offer their tears and blood, and their own children, to fight the wars for this nation around the world. And when those wars are not entered into reluctantly for the sake of defense, but rather as expansive adventures in nation building in far off places, for the benefit of the hellish combine of the manufacture of death for profits, that is the gravest injustice and most horrific tax of all.

The corporations, in one form or another, own the housing, pay the wages, charge what they will for the food and medicine, and essentially own the company store in a pernicious monopoly whose sole goal is to sustain and maximize itself as its own end.

The system is so unfair and so rigged now that the poor will pay the price of it, the taxes of its corruption and injustice, from the moment they are born until the day that they die.

In the end, the wealthy are wealthy because the not-so-wealthy buy what they are selling.  If the not-so-wealthy don't have the money to buy those things, the wealthy will not continue getting more wealthy.  As wages continue to be squeezed in the developed world, the rich need to realize that they aren't separate from the crowd, but actually dependent on it.  You can only squeeze so much juice out of that lemon before you can't make any more lemonade from it.  The middle class has borrowed as much as it can borrow.  The poor have been squeezed dry.  Without real wage growth, we are going to be in an economic mess for a long time.