Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

LETTER TO THE EDITOR:

US has become a plutocracy

The tax cut bill was a gift to corporations and the wealthy — which includes President Donald Trump and his family — and a non-event for the rest of us.

The average salary for the middle class went up 2.9 percent last year. The corporate tax cut was 40 percent.

Corporations are picking the pockets of their workers. Americans for Tax Fairness quoted the tax savings for some corporations in billions of dollars — Apple, $6 billion; AT&T $2.9 billion, Bank of America $3.2 billion, Verizon $2.4 billion and Walmart $2.1 billion.

About three dozen corporate giants funded a lobbying firm named Reforming America’s Taxes Equitably (RATE) to promote the lie that tax breaks would boost job creation. ThinkProgress.org found that several RATE members collectively eliminated over 100,000 jobs.

Economist Paul Krugman noted that foreigners own 35 percent of U.S. corporate stocks, so a third of the tax cuts went abroad. What happened to making America great again?

Louis Brandeis, a Supreme Court justice from 1916 to 1939, said: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Monopolies in high tech, banking, air travel, mass media and wealth are creating a plutocracy working against the democracy that is us.