Yes, we may in fact need to raise taxes on everyone across the board, as was done in Denmark, to achieve Denmarkian levels of success and prosperity. The immediate problem is, you can’t do that to most Americans right now without driving them all directly into the poor house. It’s a long-term prospect that depends on everyone being better off first, and then you can supplement that prosperity with stronger and stronger social protections. So if we’re playing at being realistic, let’s tackle a few other problems first:
- Eliminate the cap on Social Security taxes. Right now if you make over $118,500 per year, your income beyond that amount isn’t taxed for Social Security. Rather than continue to punish the working poor by raising the retirement age higher and higher, let’s get rid of that cap and start taxing billionaires Social Security taxes on every dollar they earn, regardless of where it came from (no exceptions for capital gains).
- Raise the minimum wage. $7.25/hour was a fucking joke 2 decades ago; now it’s just abusive. Seattle has proven that a $15/hour minimum wage doesn’t negatively impact employment (vocal opponents in the local restaurant industry have even changed their tune after seeing the results). Further, ban service industries from using tips as a replacement for paying minimum wage. In Kentucky, wait staff get paid just over $2/hour because they’re expected to make the rest up in tips, which is fucking bullshit. By raising the minimum wage, everyone goes home with more money in their pockets, which goes a long way toward stimulating the economy from the bottom up.
- Reinstate strong, pro-labor policies that make it easier for employees to unionize and collectively bargain with their employers. This is especially important at massive companies like Wal-Mart (which has a terrible history of bullying prospective unionization efforts out of existence), where the average employee has absolutely zero power to negotiate better working conditions or salary for themselves.
- Reinstate a strong estate tax. This is the most powerful tool the government has against generational wealth’s force multiplier effect, and while it will by necessity be a generational fix, it’s best to put it in place now, rather than later.
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Close as many corporate tax loopholes and offshore accounting hacks as possible. The statutory federal tax rate for corporations may be a lamented-by-Republicans 35%, but no company with enough money to make substantial tax payments is paying that much:
http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ON-BN484_Street_G_20151023220336.jpg - Put the 90% top marginal tax rate back in place. I have yet to see a reason why not to besides “it would disincentivize getting rich”, but since it would only apply to the absurdly wealthy anyway, there’s still plenty of room under that bracket to make your fortune. Mitt Romney will just have to survive (somehow) without that second car elevator. (also, because it’s a marginal tax bracket, only income above $absurd-amount would be taxed at that rate, which always seems to be left out of “taxing the rich hurts everyone” arguments, like as soon as you become a millionaire the government will come take 90% of everything you make; combined with a lack of good education on how taxes work and an often arcane filing process that incentivizes the working poor to treat it like a magic black box that TurboTax handles for them every year, you’d almost think this was intentional…)
- Institute a tax on high-speed financial trading.
- Eliminate the tax gap between regular income and capital gains. Hell, why not tax capital gains higher than regular income, since you actually have to fucking do something to make most regular income? Wall Street is a fantasyland of imaginary cash being generated at obscene rates; let’s make sure more of it gets dumped back into the actual economy, eh?
- Get rid of some of the more onerous requirements for obtaining social services. These programs are already so heavily stigmatized that many who could benefit from them refuse to take advantage of them (spend 5 minutes googling food stamp shaming stories, just as an example). While combating waste and fraud is important, social safety net abuse doesn’t hold a candle to the amount of waste and fraud that keeps getting uncovered in corporate and military programs, so why keep going after the little people with absurd nonsense like drug tests? (Oh right, because they’re poor and deserve to be made miserable >bangs head on desk<)
Now, here’s a few things that may increase the deficit in the short-term (which is fine, Republicans who don’t understand how national economies work and spend all their time talking about kitchen tables), but ultimately will result in lower overall spending and increased economic activity:
- Give the homeless permanent, no-string-attached housing. You have to pay people to build it (which generates jobs and stimulates the economy), and it gets homeless people off the streets. Homes (or even just apartments) give people a guaranteed place to get solid night’s sleep, and a weekly stipend for food and clothing ensures that they’re more likely to be able to get and keep a job. Utah’s programs to this effect have proven that it’s cheaper in the long run to actually take care of the homeless than it is to try and criminalize sleeping on park benches and panhandling at interstate off-ramps, and it ultimately leads to better outcomes for the downtrodden than relying on soup kitchens and shame.
- Shut down the war on drugs. It’s nothing but a massive prison-stuffing program, and it disproportionately impacts the poor and minorities. Kurzgesagt has a great video on how to better tackle drug addiction problems; I say we give it a try. It can’t be any worse than the 3-decade disaster we’ve built with our current policies.
- Provide free education to everyone, from kindergarten through either a trade school program or a 4-year college degree. Public primary and secondary school exist for free to ensure that we have a well-educated population; public trade schools and universities should do the same in an era where such programs are increasingly essential to getting a job.
- Put everyone on Medicare. That’s it. Just nationalize the health care system. Private insurance, even after the essential reforms put in place by the ACA, is a fucking scam. People’s health shouldn’t be subject to a private company’s profit motive. This includes enforcing affordable prices for prescription drugs and eliminating regulations that allow drug companies to pay to keep generics off the market; if you’re worried about companies not investing in new medications because of a reduced chance of profiting off of their discoveries, then use government funds and grants to fund medical research to promote the general Welfare, as it says in the Constitution. A sick population is an expensive population. Put it on the national credit card to start, then adjust the existing medicare taxes to cover the added expense as the country reaps the benefits of actually receiving quality heath care without going fucking bankrupt, even with insurance (let me tell you about the time I paid almost $800 to be told I might have passed a kidney stone before they could find out why I was peeing Hawaiian Punch).
- Invest in reintegration programs and other policies to help those getting out of prison return to normal society. We have a serious recidivism problem in this country, and a lot of it is because we do everything we can to make it as hard as possible for someone convicted of a crime to reintegrate back into society. Getting rid of things like the “have you ever been convicted of a crime” checkbox on job applications is one thing, but we also need to get rid of other roadblocks against felons and other criminals, from housing to employment to being able to vote. The voting thing is especially critical because policing and felony convictions already disproportionately target the poor and especially minorities, and the inability to vote because you’re a felon just serves to further disenfranchise these already-underrepresented groups.
While we’re mucking around with the entire tax code, let’s shift the financial incentives for production and consumption away from things that we know are bad for individuals and the environment:
- Put a tax soft drinks and other sugar-heavy foods. I love me some Coke, but I also know that it’s eventually going to drive me into type 2 diabetes eventually. I’d buy OJ from McDonalds for $1 if soft drinks suddenly cost twice as much.
- Subsidize fresh and healthy foods, instead of corn that will go into HFCS and ethanol. It’s so much easier to eat heavily-processed, pre-packaged shit when you’re poor than it is to eat healthy (there’s a transportation component to this that I’ll address in a minute).
- Eliminate subsidies and tax incentives for fossil fuel companies and dirty forms of energy production. Transfer every dollar into new programs that incentivize green energy production (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, etc.). Provide rebates for putting solar panels on rooftops of houses and apartment buildings. Provide rebates to apartment and retail complexes to install EV charging stations.
- Institute a carbon tax. Denmark has the right idea taxing the industries and products (like cars) that are the most powerful contributors to climate change. Subsidize the development, production, and purchase of greener HEVs and BEVs.
We also need to address personal mobility on a very literal level. Most of our urban public transportation systems are a complete joke. They’re slow, over-crowded, and service steadily smaller areas and times as budgets contract. There needs to be a concerted federal and state investment in making public transportation fast, efficient, and accessible, both through expanded bus and mass transit options, and through networked solutions like bike shares and local mini-BEV rentals. These transportation infrastructure improvements help in a myriad of ways:
- They reduce overall carbon emissions by often taking private vehicles off the roads, and utilizing greener forms of transit in urban environments.
- Mass transit improvements reduce traffic congestion, improving travel times at peak hours.
- It becomes easier for poor people who may not have a car to get to a job, or make more frequent trips to a grocery store (this is the other component to helping people eat healthier; if you can only get to the store once a month, you’re not going to buy nearly as much fresh, high-quality food and instead rely on heavily-processed, pre-packaged stuff that will last forever).
There are obviously other institutional problems related to our treatment of minorities in this country that also need to be addressed in order to really tackle income inequality on every level for as many people as possible, but this post is already enormous, and those structural problems are a lot harder to address than this relatively low-hanging fruit which will still have a very broad impact. But once we’ve tackled some of these things and Americans aren’t dealing with working 3 part-time jobs at maybe-not-even-minimum-wage, then yeah, we can talk about raising everyone’s taxes like they have in Denmark to make sure that these and future programs get paid for.
Frankly, I don’t care if all of this puts me on Bill Gates and Warren Buffet’s “enemies” list; there’s a fuck of a lot more of people like me than there are of them.
