1980--A Watershed Year

When historians evaluate the 20th century, I suspect many of them, if not most, will cite 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan as a watershed year and a watershed event. Why? Because it marked the end of FDR's America and the start of Reagan's "supply side economy," i.e., a massive shift of power and wealth from the American middle class to the American rich, super rich and their international friends. Not even Reagan, though, took it as far as Bush II did.

Bush and friends took it to unimaginable extremes 20 years later by stealing the 2000 presidential election and doing to America what W did to Texans when he used their tax dollars to buy the Rangers professional baseball team and walk away without having to use his own money to pay the bill.

Credit David Cay Johnston of the New York Times for investigating the evidence of the last 30 years and showing it in a book entitled FREE LUNCH: HOW THE WEALTHIEST AMERICANS ENRICH THEMSELVES AT GOVERNMENT EXPENSE (AND STICK YOU WITH THE BILL). He cites example after example of "welfare at the top" and "corporate socialism."

One set of facts in particular is easy for many of us to remember and relate to: the facts that show how often over the last three decades we've watched our tax dollars go to build giant new venues for professional sports teams. That's at the same time we were slowing or outright denying needed tax support to public services, e.g., parks, schools, libraries, highways and bridges--to name just a few.

Another set of examples--less well known, perhaps, but as or even more offensive to those of us who think public money should stay in the public sector--shows how federal sales taxes at the major "box stores," e.g., WalMart, Target, et al, are NOT going to the U.S. treasury but rather to the companies themselves. They're using our tax dollars, awarded as tax subsidies to pay for their stores.

Not sure about you, but I loathe seeing my tax dollars go to subsidize payments to billionaires and not to the American poor and middle classes. We can't even be sure the big guys are paying ANY taxes. Under the corporate welfare state, they've become masters at going offshore, relocating overseas and god knows what all to keep you and me from cutting into their profits by demanding they pay their fair share. They've robbed us blind, frankly, and have laughed all the way to the island banks where their opulent yachts have carried them.

Johnston also cites "institutionalized corruption" in the American housing industry. He especially shines a light on darker practices that mean homebuyers
get stuck with excessive costs exacted by land title companies. Too many of them have been caught in kickback schemes that amounted to outright crime. Crime that no one sees fit to prosecute, now that the government and the courts are sympathetic to anti-taxpaying schemes of big business, certainly, if not of you and me.

To friends who grew tired over the years of my citing 1980 as The Worst Turning Away from American Social Responsibility in my lifetime, please read David Cay Johnston's FREE LUNCH. He's gathered far more real evidence than I was ever willing to. I honor the man for his patriotism!