By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
It is estimated that over 100,000 Americans participated in so-called “Tea Parties” across the U.S. this weekend to protest their country’s tax policies.
While many of the protestors were rightly protesting the never-ending tax holiday for America’s rich and super-rich and America’s giant corporations, most were from the abysmally ignorant majority of Americans who blindly and wrongly assume their real incomes have been falling for 30 years because of over-taxation.
This, of course, is what the right-wing corporate mass media and politicians want the public to believe, especially Fox News and the whole News America Corp.
The right-wingers want the masses to believe this fallacy for two reasons: First, because endless tax cuts will eventually cripple the power of governments to act in the public interest, and, second, because it deflects the attention of the masses away from the corporations and the super-rich whose unbridled and unchallenged greed has truly bankrupted the masses.
The simple reality is that America has the lowest effective tax rates for the rich and the corporations in the whole industrialized world.
But unlike most of the industrialized world, poor and middle-class Americans get little back in return for their hard-earned tax dollars.
The American social safety net is a cruel hoax. That’s why, in the richest and most powerful country in the world, almost 50 million cannot afford health care and more than three million are homeless.
What Americans do get for their tax dollars, however, are endless wars against mostly defenceless countries who cheap labour and cheap resources are coveted by American corporations and the super-rich Americans that control them.
But Canada is almost as bad. A generation of tax cut after tax cut after tax cut for corporations and the rich and of spending cut after spending cut after spending cut for the masses have left the Great White North with a social safety net that is now almost as tattered and torn as America’s.
It’s time for both the U.S. and Canada to put a screeching halt to the never-ending tax cuts for corporations and the rich and finally make them pay their fair share – so that the masses can finally have more than a couple of crumbs off the banquet tables of the elite.