RESTORE THE REVENUE STREAMS! By Charlene Spretnak

Charlene Spretnak is one of the Founding Mothers of the Women’s Spirituality movement. She is the author of eight books, including most recently Relational Reality. She is a professor in the Women’s Spirituality graduate program in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies. For further information about her books, see www.CharleneSpretnak.com. 

In the 1990s a broad coalition of Christian organizations and development NGOs mounted a successful international campaign known as Jubilee 2000, which pushed for a just resolution to a moral issue: the crushing interest payments on “Third World” development loans that had been forced on those countries in ways that had enriched the Northern banks and drained the South for decades. The campaign resulted in the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, which provides systematic debt relief for the poorest countries as well as new safeguards to assure that aid money is actually spent on the alleviation of poverty, and also the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI), which offers 100% cancellation of multilateral debts owed by HIPC countries to the World Bank, IMF, and African Development Bank.

Today we face a moral issue in our own country that similarly sacrifices the poor, the working class, the middle class – and, really, the future of our country – in order to enrich even further the wealthiest strata of our society. The anti-tax movement, initiated and spearheaded by Grover Norquist, has been working for decades to reduce the amount of income tax paid by the rich (accomplished by huge tax cuts for the wealthy during the Reagan and then the George W. Bush administrations) and also to “shrink the beast” of government down to a skeletal level (having abolished all social and educational services).

Norquist and his associates have had success in recent years in blocking the roll-back of the Bush tax cuts for the rich and in insisting that massive cuts must now be made in government spending to match the gutted revenue stream of government income. By far, his most successful tactic has been to get hundreds of Congressmen and state legislators to take a pledge to never vote for any new taxes, thereby making the ideological commitment a point of honor, publicly sworn to. Once pledged, these lawmakers assert relentlessly that the only way to address government debt at any level is to cut spending on government programs and services. Their claim that the United States is nearly broke is bogus: there is plenty of money in this country, but the very rich have succeeded in excluding most of their income from taxation.

Anyone not sworn to the Norquist project and still in his or her right mind knows that to seriously address a deficit we must both trim government spending of certain kinds and restore the revenue streams. This would NOT entail NEW taxes, merely the restoration of previous levels of income tax on the very wealthy that they paid in the 1990s, when they were doing fine and experienced no dearth of mansions and yachts. In fact, if the Norquist legions really want to get away from new taxes, we could restore the very old tax levels paid by the upper brackets during the Eisenhower administration, when we had enough federal revenue to do what we needed to do: build the community college system and the interstate highway system (though much of that money would better have gone for a first-class mass transit network in our country).

For the past three years, the Democratic Party has proven itself to be completely ineffectual on this issue by allowing the Norquist-oriented Republicans to get away with calling any restoration of previous tax levels a NEW tax, which it is not. In the absence of an effective opposition, the Republican strategists have been able to keep any mention of RESTORING THE REVENUE STREAMS out of the national debate. Polls show this repeatedly, with the majority of Americans convinced (not to say brainwashed) that the only way to address federal and state deficits is to radically slash spending on government programs – even though most responders to the polls are suffering from reduced levels of operation for police and fire departments, schools and colleges, libraries, infrastructure repair, public health, job retraining, and so on – all so that the rich can pocket even more money.

This is an extremely critical situation, which will surely cause our country to sink from our previous levels of education and prosperity unless we can RESTORE THE REVENUE STREAMS such that government spending can once again aid the present and build for our future. Norquist’s grip on Congressmen and legislators is so extensive that possibly only a grassroots movement of religious organizations and other community groups can insist on a commonsense solution to budget problems. And why not women in those religious organizations leading the way? After all, we are adept at insightful long-term thinking and empathy for those who sincerely need assistance.

Social Security: Correcting the Revenue Stream

The Social Security system is not part of the federal deficit because it has its own revenue stream. It is paid for by a flat tax, which for years was 6.2% for employees, 6.2% for employers, and 12.4% for the self-employed. In spite of claiming that the Social Security system is soon to be insolvent, Republicans in Congress succeeded in cutting the tax rates in 2011 to 4.2%, 6.2%, and 10.4%, thereby damaging the revenue stream. Rather than cutting elderly people’s Social Security benefits, as Republicans assert is necessary, the tax rate needs to be restored to the pre-2011 level.

However, there is a larger problem, one of democratic fairness: many citizens do not pay the Social Security flat tax on all their income. The high-income earners pay absolutely no Social Security tax on any income above $106,800 – even if they make $43 million a year (as some do). At the beginning of the Social Security system, the rich lobbied for this cap on the income that can be taxed for Social Security, which has put a huge hole into the revenue stream over the decades. Were the Social Security flat tax to be applied equally and democratically to all income levels, there would be plenty of money to meet the obligations of the Social Security system now and in the future. If there is to be a cap, it should not be on the Social Security wage base but on the amount of benefits that are paid to the very rich. After all, Social Security, the G.I. Bill after World War II, and Medicare enabled the rise of a strong middle class in this country. Rather than gutting them as “frivolous entitlement programs,” as many Republicans assert, we should democratize the way Social Security is funded. ABOLISH THE CAP ON TAXABLE INCOME FOR SOCIAL SECURITY.

Two Moral Positions Excluded from the National Debate

I hope women inside and outside of organized religion – along with everyone else who wants to stop the national debate on the government budget from being highjacked – will organize efforts to get these two issues talked about in community meetings, on radio programs, in newspapers and blogsites, and in our legislative bodies and electoral campaigns. Through a vast and well-funded effort to manipulate public opinion, one-half of the debate has been excluded. Please circulate this post and broaden the public debate as soon as possible.

RESTORE THE REVENUE STREAMS FOR OUR GOVERNMENT!

ABOLISH THE CAP ON THE SOCIAL SECURITY WAGE BASE!