Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

LETTER TO THE EDITOR:

Prosperity being strained to the breaking point

Wrangling between Republicans and Democrats over budgets in Wisconsin and Washington reminds me of the joke about moving the deck chairs on the Titanic as it was sinking.

Our standard of living is sinking: Manufacturing jobs producing exports are disappearing, technical jobs are outsourced, and chiefly non-export service jobs remain. As a result, incomes generally are down, so is tax revenue, and we have growing deficits.

These old problems are partly out of our control. In our global marketplace, labor and oil are commodities ruled by supply and demand; and the price of oil has gone up while the cost of labor abroad has gone down.

Unfortunately, this issue has been hidden for 40 years by borrowing and lower tax rates.

Are there fixes? States reducing taxes to attract business won’t do it. That’s cannibalism. It produces no new jobs and reduces revenue and services everywhere.

Cutting federal taxes and services is no better; indeed for our political system it is worse. Probably nothing can be done about foreign competition forcing down our standard of living, but something must be done about saving the working middle class; it is the backbone of what we call our democratic society. Both will disappear if we don’t rebuild our economy.

We must strengthen our infrastructure, comprehensively educate impoverished cultural groups and improve our roads and bridges. And we can do this and reduce deficits if we have a general surtax on all incomes. This won’t cripple anyone’s pocketbook.

Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins recently argued that what is truly crucial for many people — the wealthy especially when it comes to fighting new taxes; she was writing about an NFL owner — is not money but status and the power it conveys, satisfying the ego.

Is this what we want? Let’s do what is necessary to restore our democratic society and political system.

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