Thank You Donald Trump

Thank you, Donald Trump. You have managed to illustrate very well one of the greatest and most ridiculous inequities in our country. I have been arguing with people over the federal income tax rates for years. Everyone seems to have a problem or two and the buzz words used by all sides are “middle class shouldn’t bear the brunt of the burden” I agree with that, don’t you? Everyone I know says the same thing. We all like to think of ourselves as being in the middle income bracket.

“I don’t like the fact that I work and I am paying these huge taxes and that person doesn’t work and gets free stuff.” “Why should someone who doesn’t want to work get to live off my hard earned tax money?” I definitely understand that. I have worked in a real job where I paid into social security and had income tax taken out of my paycheck since I was fourteen and I was babysitting and doing little jobs for people for years before that to earn money.

I am still working part-time now even though I am retired. I still declare my income and am taxed accordingly. I too look for legal deductions to lower my rate and feel sort of good when I am gifted with a deduction option. I am not a deadbeat so I understand when someone complains about carrying the tax burden for those that don’t pay their fair share.

Where we part understanding is in who we don’t mind supporting. I have been making the argument for years that the ultra-wealthy (that exalted 1%) is not paying their fair share and others are arguing that the poor (an increasing percentage) are not paying their fair share. The logic used there is that the wealthy work harder for their money and the poor are worthless. 

There are a couple of flaws in that logic. Number one is that most of the people living in poverty are not deadbeats. They do work and work hard doing hard work. They work longer hours and get fewer benefits and less time off and still need assistance to feed their children and keep a roof over their heads because the wealthy do not want to pay a living wage.  I really don’t mind helping them out if I can. You probably don’t either. I think we both agree than those who scam the system should be denied, but not those unable to work and not the children.

Second if every person who lives below the poverty line paid income tax at the current rate, it would not equal what a single billionaire would pay without the loopholes that allow them to not pay taxes on certain income. I don’t like subsidizing the ultra-wealthy, but for some reason beyond my comprehension I get a lot of push-back when I suggest we ask them to be taxed at the same overall rate as the rest of us, as the middle income earners. They usually fall back on how a tax increase will affect them, a realistic thought.

If we stop the deduction for monies earned from investments, that will affect people who have been wise enough to put back money into dividend paying accounts. We can and make adjustments for the middle income earners if we make adjustments to the code for the upper income earners to make it more equitable.

I currently get some benefit from the real estate deductions because I own a rental property. There are many other lines in the tax rules that benefit us all, but could be rewritten or adjusted so that the middle income earners can still have bit of help without making it possible for someone who could handle a billion dollar loss in a single year to get to live tax free for the next 18.

Whatever system allows someone like Donald Trump to profit over an annual loss of a billion dollars needs to be changed. For one thing much, maybe most of that billion dollars was not born by him at all. The banks who financed his failed projects took part of it. The contractors and working class who made those projects possible did not get paid what they were promised and Don was given a whopper of a ride at their expense. Besides the fact that he personally made the bad decisions that affected thousands of lives and he had the resources to risk when they did not and he walked away undamaged and unrepentant and they were left to struggle, is the very big factor, that he not only did not pay taxes for that year but perhaps for the next 18 years. Did you?

Think about it this way. He did not contribute a percentage of his earnings to the federal budget.  For all  that time he did not contribute to the US defense fund and in that time many of the rest of us bore and raised a child that has now been sent to battle and may not have returned and all that time we were paying taxes. That just doesn't seem quite right to me.

Christa Hedrick