The Weekly Screed (#539)

OK, we’ve sacrificed. Where do we go to get our “share?”
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — Real people know about “withholding.” It’s where you have a
little income tax deducted — withheld — every payday, thus stretching
your taxes out over the whole year. This saves you from a big lump-sum
invoice from the IRS on April 15, which nobody with a normal paycheck
could afford to pay all at once.

Rich people don’t withhold. They don’t know what it is.

Rich people itemize.

Actually, rich people don’t even itemize. They have accountants and
lawyers who itemize for them. And lobby. And litigate. And delay. And
lie.
With all that costly help, rich people never, ever, pay a nickel on
April 15. If they do end up with a balance due, heads roll.
Accountants, lawyers and liars get fired.

Real people got nobody to fire.

However, real people, who learn early in life how to fill out a W-4,
often get to April 15 with no balance due. This is because a lot of us
crafty taxpayers over-withhold a little bit. That way, we get a refund
— a fairly pathetic windfall we can use to replace the rain gutters,
or take Grandma out to Sunday brunch at Applebee’s.

For rich people, it’s sort of similar, except the refunds they get
aren’t from overpaying in advance. Remember, they don’t withhold. Rich
people, and corporations, do indeed get refunds from the IRS. Big
ones! But these are more like prizes. Every April, Uncle Sam rewards
the rich — for their tireless lobbying, for their accountants’
dazzling displays of fiscal legerdemain, and for the brilliant
sophistries of their attorneys — by bestowing containers full of cash.

Containers — so the money can go directly onto ships and sail through
waters protected by the U.S. Navy to havens unknown to real people and
inviolate to the IRS. Perhaps you’ve heard — probably not — of a
five-story office building in the Cayman Islands, called Ugland House.
At last count, it contained 19,000 corporate headquarters.

Where’s it come from — the cash that goes to the rich, and then on to
Ugland House? This was money withheld from everybody else’s paycheck.
From us.

Real people, if they get a tax refund, score a whopping hundred bucks or so.

General Electric just got $14.2 billion.

From us. You. Me. Peg. Bill. Aaron and Amy. Tom and Vicky. Patty and
Oren. Richard and Fanny. Jill and Gene. Even Joe, the non-plumbing
Plumber.

Here’s another little benchmark. In 2009, when we were still in the
throes of the Bush Depression, the average bonus for a Wall Street
trader — that being a guy in a silk suit who does no actual work, in
that he’s never produced one tangible thing in his entire parasitic
life and probably never will — was $123,850. These bonuses — $20.3
billion — were handed out at places like AIG, Citigroup and Bank of
America, the same hedge-fund boiler-rooms and Wall Street casinos that
collected $700 billion in bailouts.

From us. You. Me. Peg. Bill. Ken and Sandy. Ann and Jon. Ron and Donna.

Lately, everybody in Washington, from Obama to Boehner, is talking
“shared sacrifice.” And they should. These are tough times, at least
for most of us.

Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Congressman credited with being a genius of
conservative fiscal policy, has specified the necessary sacrifices in
the coming orgy of sharing. He has a master plan to squeeze $4.4
trillion from old folks, sick people, the poor, the hungry, the
homeless, wage-earners, public employees, working mothers, temps,
field hands, college students, little kids, cripples, lunatics,
retards, rape victims and shut-ins.

More or less, that’s us. You. Me. Peg. Bill. Dad and Lyla. Peter and
Faith. Cathy and Gaylord. George and Ellen. Stan and Linda. Myra and
Patrick.

Ryan promises that these shared sacrifices will work so well that we
can afford to cut $4.1 trillion in business, corporate and personal
taxes for people like, well, those Wall Street pirates who are queuing
up on the pier clutching their treasure chests and filling out
shipping labels to Ugland House. And Zurich. And Macao.

Speaking of shared sacrifice, the Financial Times notes that the
bottom 90 percent of Americans have experienced no actual wage growth
since 1973. While nine-tenths of us have seen our income grow only10
percent in 38 years (inflation grew faster), the upper 10 percent has
tripled (that’s 300 percent!) its average household income.

On the CIA’s “equality index,” which measures the gap between a
nation’s richest and poorest, America ranks 93rd in the world. This
puts us behind China, Russia and Iran.

“Nowadays in America, you have a smaller chance of swapping your lower
income bracket for a higher one than in almost any other developed
economy,” wrote FT’s Edward Luce. “To invert the classic Horatio Alger
stories, in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier
to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe.”

Luce quoted economist Larry Katz: “Think of the American economy as a
large apartment block. A century ago — even 30 years ago — it was the
object of envy. But in the last generation its character has changed.
The penthouses at the top keep getting larger and larger. The
apartments in the middle are feeling more and more squeezed and the
basement has flooded. To round it off, the elevator is no longer
working.”

This is where withholding comes in.

Real people — us! You. Me. Peg. Bill. Dick and Rita, Chip and Judy —
we’ve been withholding now and paying our share since the first Arab
oil embargo, since Leonardo DiCaprio was born and disco died. We’ve
been cutting corners, clipping coupons, maxing out credit cards,
taking second jobs, applying for second mortgages, playing the
lottery, voting against the union because we’re afraid of getting
fired, getting gouged by payday loan sharks, standing in unemployment
lines, applying for food stamps, eating Hamburger Helper, skipping
meals to pay for our heart pills, skipping pills to stretch the
prescription — all this and worse. We’ve been withholding for 40
goddamn years.

It’s time for someone else — them, not us — to sacrifice. Their share
is way overdue, and the late fees are huge.

It’s their turn to withhold.