This issue’s story on the destructive fallacies pushed by advocates of supply-side economics — “The failed experiment” by David Cay Johnston, the country’s top tax policy journalist, a story that is running simultaneously in alt-weeklies around the country – really couldn’t come at a better time. Please, read it, and consider our current moment.
On the national level, President Obama has joined the Republicans in cutting up the social safety net and regulatory system in order to maintain indefensible inequities in our tax system. And on the local level, one-time progressive Sups. David Chiu and Jane Kim have joined fiscal conservatives on the board to approve tax breaks for corporations and landlords and promote the flawed but poll-tested argument that the payroll tax is a “job killer.”
Yet that argument – we all need jobs so we shouldn’t challenge the corporations and rich people that provide them – has become so widely accepted that politicians wave it like a get-out-of-scrutiny-free card at an increasingly desperate public. So it’s crucial that writers like Johnston point out that much of what these people are saying simply isn’t true. Supply-side economics is destroying our country, not helping it.
The evidence for the failure of this 30-year economic experiment is clear in Johnston’s piece, as well as on the streets of San Francisco and every major American city. It’s reflected in our pervasive public budget deficits at a time of record corporate profits and our insistence on running our fossil-fueled economic system at full speed even as the poor and planet lay bleeding by the roadside.
Our deference to corporate titans is so pervasive and deeply instilled that it even applies to Black Rock City LLC, the corporation that stages Burning Man, an event and culture based on equally participating in a decommodified gift economy, but where few burners are willing to question the board’s plan for cashing out and creating a new governance structure.
In this and almost all exercises of corporate power and unchecked decision-making, the people feel powerless. If Twitter, Zynga, and Yelp threaten to leave and take their jobs with them, we have to accept their demands, right? And if not powerless, then simply grateful for the jobs, culture, and technologies that they have so generously bestowed upon us. We’re like slaves who appreciate the food, shelter, opportunities, and security we’ve been given and know how unwise it would be to rebel.
But once upon a time, the people understood that corporations are originally created as instruments of public good, not just private profits. They are created with charters approved in the name of the people, permission that could be revoked at any time if there was the political will to do so. But that will has long since been broken, the wage slaves and their representatives too scared, self-interested, or content to even dream of their own liberation. And it really doesn’t matter whether the corporations are publicly held or privately owned, LLCs or nonprofits, we still see them as the keys to our survival and well-being, so the last thing we want to do is make demands on them that might be seem unreasonable and ungrateful.
And so it goes. We willingly accept that the value of our labors is not our own. We let the rich get richer and richer – now to levels unheard of in any other civilized country – and pass the bill on to our grandchildren, the people who will finally be forced to deal with our folly, fear, and foolishness as the oceans rise and civil society recedes.
But I’m not simply going along with it, and I’m not alone. We need to resist this doomed system, for posterity’s sake if nothing else. I’ll keep writing polemics like this one, covering the campaigns of people like Sup. John Avalos who are willing to buck this trend, exposing corruption and sleeping watchdogs, and giving a forum to malcontents like Chicken John who raise questions that demand to be answered.
I fervently believe that the decisions made by publicly accountable individuals, in open forums and with the best information available, are infinitely superior to those made behind closed doors by people who have a self-interest in the outcome. And that’s why I’m proud to work for a progressive publication like the Guardian that speaks truth to power and features stories like “The failed experiment.”