Tax the Rich – Because You’re Heavily Taxed and They Aren’t

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The really short story is that Trump and the Republicans passed a tax and spending bill this year that taxes you to spend on benefits for the rich.

The bill increases the US national debt to record levels and guarantees the rich won’t be paying any of that debt by cutting their taxes.

Yeah you’re paying that debt. The rich aren’t.

WHO ARE THE RICH?

For our purposes, the rich are people with at least $50 million in assets. Yeah, FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS in assets. Stocks, properties, businesses, and other assets.

THE RICH DON’T WORK

Why should they work? When you have $50 million in assets, you don’t fucking have to work.

So people who do work are heavily taxed and end up paying off the national debt; people who do not work have their taxes cut.

WHY DO YOU GET TAXED WHEN THE RICH DON’T?

Basically, because the rich have been waging war against the working people of the US since 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected and began systematically, yet sneakily, rigging the system against working people and for bankers, financiers, investors and other people who play with money instead of working for a living.

In the Reaganomics conception of the economy that has been growing like a cancer ever since 1980, you, as a working person, are a ‘human resource’ created for exploitation by the capitalist class. You’re an input whose only value is economic in that you can produce more money for the rich than it costs them to have you do stuff for them.

You are basically like the colonists were to the British Empire back in the 1770s. A pain in the ass, and the ruling class is constantly trying to figure out how to make you pay more so you cost them less.

You, by virtue of your willingness to work for them, are seen by the rich as ‘less than’ and not entitled to the rights and liberties asset owners like themselves should have.

TODAY’S TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION

Back in 1773, when the British were passing Tea Acts and whatnot seemingly designed specifically to piss off Massachusetts colonists, American activists hit upon the slogan ‘no taxation without representation.’ Their point was that they couldn’t meaningfully influence British legislation and policies through elected representatives.

Guess what? As a working American, you can’t either!

Ever since a little Supreme Court decision known as ‘Citizens United’, those bankers and lobbyists and obscenely rich billionaires and asset owners have been legally buying American politicians.

It’s not just that they buy elections. They certainly try to do that (cough, Elon Musk). They spend the equivalent of the GDP of small nations on election campaigns and PR and lies, lies, lies and spin and more lies and ads and more lies and so on.

But it’s not that they buy elections. They buy politicians.

So that no matter what party you vote for, the one fucking thing you will never see more than 6 or 7 of them EVER do, is propose taxing the rich.

You also won’t see them doing what you want them to. Poll after poll shows that what politicians do IS NOT what the vast majority of actual people in America favor.

Making taxes fair so that the rich pay at least as big a proportion of their income as you do is wildly popular on every side of any political aisle that exists. Right, left, center, up, down, young, old, black, white, women, men, you name it, everyone agrees. Even millionaires agree. Because most millionaires don’t have $50 million dollars in assets. Most millionaires in America actually work for a living.

monopolies are another form of tax

Back when American colonists were getting their mojo running, gearing up to say ‘fuck you’ to the most powerful group of people on the planet – one of the things that pissed them off big time was that the East India Company had a monopoly on tea in America. The law required Americans to buy British tea.

The colonists knew that restricting their right to buy tea to one single heavily subsidized British company was just another way of screwing them over.

Guess what? The same war against working people that Republicans ushered into American life in the 1980s favors deregulation and market concentration. Market concentration is a polite way of saying that a few Richie Richingtons end up owning everything. Which means – there is no where to escape the 35 biggest corporations on the planet. Which means they drive up prices on everything from your rent to your food to your plane tickets. It’s another tax on you and gift to them.

It’s not that different from tea and the American colonists except for one thing. It was just tea for them, it’s almost everything for you. And that, my friends, is a recipe for a shipwreck on stormy seas.

It’s the Culmination of Decades of tax laws

That have left the vast majority of Americans stressed about groceries while…

Jeff Bezos has $235 BILLION or so in assets. Billion. You’re worried about the cost of food, and he has billions of dollars. That he doesn’t pay taxes on.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT CURRENT TAX UNFAIRNESS THAT FAVORS THE RICH?

The obvious answer is to tax the fucking rich. But how to do make that happen?

Well, if we look for inspiration to our founding revolutionaries, we see that they held a party. A tea party in fact. In Boston. On some ships in the harbor.

Short party. Only lasted about 3 hours. And the partiers didn’t even damage the ships. They just tossed the tea.

But the British saw it as disobedience. And they got pissed off. And they cracked down. They literally closed that harbor to trade. 16 months later, the American revolutionary war began. And 2 1/2 years later there was a declaration of independence heard round the world.

That tax cut bill for the rich is the beginning of the end

It’s either the beginning of the end of the tyranny of the rich in American political affairs or it’s the beginning of the end of your life in a democracy.

As you may or may not have noticed, the rich are consolidating power under this Trump administration. They are trying to take over states, cities, companies, and anyone else who stands up to them.

They are even shaking down their own. Trump has told companies like Nvidia it’ll have to give the U.S. government 15% of H20 chip sales in China in exchange for export permissions. Which is a whole new plot twist in the saga of the richest billionaires’ effort to destroy everything on earth including themselves.

We’ve gone all the way from the corporate deregulation of Reaganomics to the merging of business and state. In fact, we’re looping all the way back around to communism, the very thing that terrified the architects of Reaganomics.

Oh the irony.

Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs and shakedowns are the first in what will most likely be a series of actions to end the ‘free market’ capitalism in America that economists promised would create the best of all possible worlds.

Put bluntly, capitalism in America will end up being subject to some sort of reform – either in a way that benefits you – or in a way that benefits almost no one. Taxing the rich benefits everyone. Letting the rich shake each other down in some sort of corporate state Mafia war benefits no one.

The bottom line

The fates of nations often turn on the smallest of incidents. Those early American colonists in Massachusetts endured a brutal and enraging 13 years of creeping tyranny before the Boston Tea Party, and years of coercion, repression and violence after said tea party.

This was hard. History tends to gloss over the hard part. The difficulties and excesses of the Revolution. The years of bitter suffering before independence was declared. And the little things that ultimately helped the cause.

One of those things was a pissed off person in the British government who spilled the tea on his bosses to Benjamin Franklin. Who spilled the tea to some pissed off American activists. Who literally spilled the tea into Boston Harbor.

Which pissed off the bosses in the British government. Which led them to wreak vengeance on the colonists. Which pissed off the colonists enough to say well, enough is enough.

I don’t know what small things can turn the tide in 2025. But I do know we need some patriot leaders to party this year – party like it’s Boston in 1773.

No taxation without representation. Enough is enough. #Taxtherich.

Get pretty fed up.