Tax Corporations, Tax Wealth, Tax the Highest Income Earners, Tax Income From Investments

Here's something your beleaguered working-class blue n' white collar stiffs who voted for Rob Ford might understand. Some people have been making out like bandits for the past couple of decades, and they haven't exactly been doing anything productive for society to earn their keep.

Stephen Gordon, who i used to listen to on rabble-babble-dot-ca, and enmasse.ca, until the economic crisis which reared its head in summer 2008 totally discredited mainstream neoliberalism, continuously hawks the notion that taxing corporations is counterproductive, and that it makes more sense to tax consumption and let corporations invest their wealth in productivity-increasing avenues which create jobs. He refers to Sweden, which has low taxes on corporations, combined with consumption taxes, as well as highly progressive social service provision.

But Swedish firms are also under the obligation of negotiating with powerful unions which have significant oversight over corporate decision-making. In North America, a corporation is basically a cash-cow for overpaid managers and what's left goes to passive shareholders. Given that it's easier to legislate taxes than it is to command governance reform of private institutions, we should just tax the useless mother-fuckers and recover billions of dollars that went nowhere but into exotic, non-productive financial products and conspicuous consumption.

We should tax wealth because wealth inequality in this country is far more gigantic than income inequality and it is creating a class of plutocrats exceedingly dangerous to our feeble democracy. We should advertise loud-and-clear, and unapologetically, that we are going to break up the large family fortunes and make the heirs of billionaires have to work for themselves. All wealth over 1 million dollars will be taxed at increasingly steep rates.

We should tax the highest income earners because, as with everything else, they don't really do anything for the amount of money they get to take home. Overpriced corporate executives, corporate lawyers, entertainment figures, politicians, ... they're none of them so deserving of the vast amounts of money that gets shovelled their way. When we think of the productive corporate executives of the 1945-73 "golden age" of Western capitalism, and comparatively modest their incomes were and how much more socially productive they were, it beggars belief to imagine that these self-serving high-earners today believe they truly deserve such compensation as a result of the "talent" they bring to whatever it is they think they're doing.

Finally, tax investment income at the same level as income from work. Income from labour is far more dearly bought and is taxed, unfairly, at significantly higher levels. Taxing investment income should be fine-tuned to reward productive investments, but for the most part, "investing" in the Anglo-American countries has meant nothing more than the equivalent of buying and trading interest or dividend-earning trading cards. Instead of a bunch of nerds at a downtown convention centre, we have a bunch of expensively-suited pricks at brokerage firms of sitting in front of computer screens.

We should tax all this wasted wealth and obtain the billions of dollars needed for public investment in healthcare, education, green energy, infrastructure, public daycare, environmental reconstruction, First Nations compensation, etc., etc., .... because the private sector isn't in the business of creating jobs and social wealth anymore. They're in the business of down-sizing and profit-taking. The human world will slide into misery and crisis and the eco-system is spiralling into the abyss. We have no further time for neoliberal fantasies.