by Steve Schmidt, Darby
Nearly every politician these days has affordability as a plank in their campaign platform. However, that position is meaningless unless realistic and meaningful solutions are pursued. While capitalism is still the best option for America, constraints are required in order to make capitalism work for all Americans. Those constraints are typically regulations and a progressive tax structure.
Here’s the rub. Republican politicians insist on a wide open market driven economy without constraints. They don’t want to limit in any way someone or some company from turning a buck even if doing so harms the less fortunate. Often, they spout they don’t want to be involved in picking winners and losers.
But, if our politicians don’t get in the game and referee winners and losers, then the affordability gap will continue to grow until America collapses. Real and effective solutions involving regulating big business and adjusting tax structures are required if we have any hope of turning this K shaped economy around.
Antitrust regulations handled by the Federal Trade Commission are necessary to break up monopolies that exist in meat packing, grocery outlets, and agri-business to provide more competition that forces lower prices.
Local, state, and federal tax laws need to change to discourage private equity companies from buying up single family homes, mobile home parks, hospitals, and just about everything they can get their fingers in to.
Are we content with the status quo of just enabling the rich to get richer and letting the chips fall where they may for everyone else, or are we as a nation ready to do the hard work of really addressing affordability?
Steve Leuchtman says
Exactly: affordability is really a suite of issues. So let’s talk about the root of them:
1) working Americans have been losing ground since 1979
2) people in the Bitterroot have been voting for Republicans because they tell them what they want to hear for 3 generations, play to cultural affinity, then widen the gap between the 1% and the rest of us.
3) those Republican politicians then disappear until the next cycle when they wave the red flag at folks and expect their votes.
And Democrats have helped them by not showing up. Here’s how we can start to address the problem:
1) fix the health care system. Third party payer systems are inherently inefficient, when you have dozens of them, and several layers of profit taking and administrative costs, you get an out of control inflationary spiral. Nothing except a single payer system will fix that. I can’t do anything about that in the legislature, but I can protect the Medicaid expansion.
2) we need to get back to progressive taxation. Every time I say we should put a surtax on vacation homes worth more than $5m, even from Democrats I hear “class warfare.” Bad news folks, we’ve had a class war since 1980, the 1% against the rest of us, time to mount up and fight back.
3) we need to restore real progressivity in the income tax.
There’s a real difference between what Republican leadership (even the good Republicans like Bedey, Binkley and Rusk) looks like and what Democratic leadership looks like. Are you tired of winning yet? If winning looks like the price of gas doubling in 2 months, I’d hate to see what losing looks like.