Big Fish and Little Fish
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The following is a letter to the editor that I put in my local small town weekly. A LTE has to be around 300 words, but they let me get away most of the time with 325. When writing about economic systems, 300 words is very hard. The feedback so far has been good and they liked the fish imagery. So if you've got a local paper, try something like this:
Big fish eat little fish. That’s how it works. You hear all the time that our corporate taxes are the highest in the world. Sure, but most U.S. corps don’t pay them. 83 out of the top 100 companies paid zero taxes between 1999 and 2005. (IRS study). Zero. Companies like Exxon, GE, Carnival Cruise Line, Verizon use various loopholes to get out of paying any taxes. In the 1950s, corporations contributed about 30% of all federal revenue. Now it is down to 6%. So what happens? The tax burden is shifted to the rest of us small fry in the form of sin taxes, property taxes, and all kinds of licenses and fees that small business fish have to pay. And then the big fish wait until the small fish are gasping for air and then they gobble up their business.
Who are these big fish? The top 400 families have more wealth than 155 million working Americans do altogether. And the big fish make sure that instead of attacking them, we attack teachers, police, fire fighters, ambulance drivers, and child care workers and demand that they give up their deferred pay. And sometimes we even give the sharks subsidies. Is that for the privilege of being eaten quickly?
And no, they don’t need a tax amnesty. We tried that in 2004 and these big corps did not hire more workers.
Personally I'd like to go back to a tariff system and do away with taxes. But that's not the system we've got right now. So isn’t it really time for some shared sacrifices by those free loaders at the top? And time to stop treating them with deference as if they are lords and we are their grateful serfs. They are marauders after our pensions and Social Security and they have no divine rights. We got rid of that idea in 1776.
Time to return to the idea of The United Pools of Small Fish.
(cross posted at feralcatsoffreedom.com)
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Comments
Conservative responses
I haven't had any of my conservative acquaintances comment yet on the letter. I'll check in tonight at the local watering hole and see if anybody has a comment.
To give you a glimpse into the kind of people that frequent this restaurant/bar, you will love this incident on Wednesday night at said watering hole. I was talking to a super smart geek friend about getting a major battery backup for my computer after yet another power outage which had me without electricity for a whole day.
We were talking all that computer talk when a cattle buyer, a big guy in a big black cowboy hat, said to me, "You seem real smart. You must be a teacher."
"Really?" I said, "Curious. If I were a man would you say that?"
He paid me back later by asking if he could buy another woman at the end of the bar a drink, but not me. Of course the way he put it was "I'd like to buy that pretty girl at the end of the bar a drink."
The bartender quickly responded, "Which one?" referring to me or Mary Ann.
I lead a very odd life.
wonderful Maven
I always get a charge out of you...)
Hugh penned a good line over at NC today... i think we should ask him if we can all borrow it...)
"And a common complaint I make is that no economists are looking at the economy as a kleptocracy or in kleptonomic terms."
I have a file on my desktop called " hugh's quotes"
LIke MasterCard, they are "priceless".
Nicely written and good
Nicely written and good images. It educates without seeming to, and that's important. We have all been indoctrinated by a system for 40 years that being stolen from is somehow good for us.
Huge compliment, Hugh
And everybody. I count on the smart/ wise people here to help me and edit me. I know I can post other places and get more eyeballs, but that doesn't ' t interest me as much as how to hone the message.
Writing to really communicate. Reaching out by using images that might bring us together. Instead of the liberal curse of hoity toityness.
It was so easy to talk about all this when I lived in NYC. I lived amongst my own kind. But now I am a foreigner in a strange place. So I look at how to explain ideas to people not like me, but equals just the same. It is so easy to be condescending
But that helps no one.
.
Thanks again, my friends. Only thing that keeps me sane is our comradeship.
Just realized that this is written more like blank verse than prose. Sorry.
Great job!
This is the type of language our side needs to start using and be in the habit of repeating over and over.
(I'm all for increased import tariffs but, even with them back in place, we'll still be needing corporations to shoulder their fair share of the post New Deal, post World War II military, post Great Society tax burden.)
Yes, I threw in the tariff line
At the last moment. Wanted to Give a little hint of " protectionism". Wanted to give a little hint of libertarianism. Basically to make them think... Question themselves... Okay...you got me...I did want to fry their brains...just a bit...just short of scrambling them.
Beautiful job
MM. I'll see if I can play off of it; with links, of course.