One More Comment on the Tax Plan

At least we got a tax cut

Some people have noticed an interesting trait  in the Republican tax bill.  "Pass-through" income, i.e., income earned in a closely held corporation or partnership that passes directly to the members, is taxed as a lower rate than wages and salaries.  People doing identical work at identical pay may be taxed at very different rates depending on whether they are employees or independent contractors.  One commentator is quoted as saying that wage earners are being "substantially penalized."

This should not come as a surprise.  While Republicans in general, donors and voters alike, agree that government assistance is the worst kind of income (with some disagreement whether Social Security counts), the Republican donor class generally sees wages and salaries as the second-least worthy form of income.  Indications of this type were everywhere during the Obama Presidency, when reverence for business owners went hand-in-hand with contempt for their employees.  Underlying it all is the basic assumption that wealth is only created at the top, and only by investors, while the work force is simply a raw material applied by business owners to make things.  Often during the Obama Presidency Republicans would talk about business owners as if all or at least most Americans fit in that category.  If pressed, presumably Republicans would agree that most people at any given time were not business owners, but they tended to assume that everyone should at least aspire to own a business, and that anyone who did not was a loser and failure who probably didn't deserve to be taken into account.

This attitude reached its ultimate expression during the auto industry bailouts, when writers at the National Review and Wall Street Journal were outraged that banks and hedge funds were asked to take a loss while union members saved health insurance and pensions.  Bankers and hedge funds pours their life blood into the auto companies (the believe that wealth comes only from investors applies to passive investors as well as ones who actually run companies), while the auto workers never invested anything in the company (thirty years of work, repetitive stress injuries, etc. don't count as "investment" in the eyes of Republican donors) and were simply parasites draining it of resources and never giving anything in return.  The National Review and the Wall Street Journal  definitely wanted auto workers thrown out on the streets without their insurance or pensions as suitable punishment.  Neither went quite so far as to say that the loss of our auto industry was a small price to pay for ending the vile scourge of good-paying blue collar jobs, the the implication was never far below the surface.

This is not an attitude one would expect to be conducive toward a working class party.*  I don't think it too much of a stretch to believe that this attitude hurt Republicans with the white working class during the Romney campaign.  One of Trump's major advantages over the rest of the field was that he moved past that.  His talk about jobs and good paying jobs signaled loud and clear that he recognized most Americans would never operate a business, that many if not most did not want to operate a business, that millions are content to let someone else sign their paycheck and that that is fine.  Hell, he even played the class warrior denouncing Wall Street.

But this tax bills should show once and for all that the Republican donors are still in the driver's seat, and that their contempt for people who let someone else sign their paycheck hasn't gone away.  Now let's get the message out on that.

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*I don't mean to suggest that the working class should treat employers as an enemy and the failure to do so is false consciousness, but here was have employers treating their workforce as an enemy or, at best, as a sort of raw material to be used an discarded, and worker rights as something no less absurd that giving "rights" to raw materials.