I’ve been seeing controversy in the Monroe News and Daily Telegram columnists lately. This is exactly my thing, so if you will excuse me for stepping into this riot.
I suggest that Mr. James W. Pfister and Mr. Charles Milliken’s columns are fiction. They want you to believe what to believe.
Mr. Milliken and Mr. Pfister are retired professors who have taught economics and political science for a total of 68 years. I think young people who managed to take their classes got a distorted view of the real world.
Mr. Milliken denies that climate change is due to human activity. He denies that COVID-19 is worth calling a pandemic. He believes that capitalism is the salvation of humanity. All you have to do is pay your taxes. He knows who’s eating his cake and yours too.
He points out that health care is not a right and social programs encourage laziness. Also, higher education is only for those who can afford it. He is sure that capitalism will heal everything, but he has never explained how infinite economic growth works on a finite planet.
Expansionist economies have to grow constantly in order to function reasonably smoothly (for us at the bottom anyway). In boom times or lean years, it always works for the rich. Of course the war is lubricating that axis, but that’s Mr. Millikens god’s responsibility, so relax.
Mr. Pfister doesn’t mince his words and suggests that we should treasure rich people as our saviors. It should be obvious that these two guys are grateful recipients of what they sponsor. You have made a lucrative living with confusing young people and have been rewarded for upholding the lies of a declining empire.
Mr. Pfister gives meandering lectures about why America is the role model for the world. Occasionally he does not come to a conclusion.
He talks at length about the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, but he makes no mention of the mystical finance branch that actually controls the other three. He’s pretending there’s no lobbying. I suppose he believes the rich and ultra-rich pay their fair share of taxes.
So how do we escape their version of reality? I think the first step is to admit that we are at a dead end. We have allowed parasites to tax us on every single aspect of our lives. The food we eat, everything we drink, including water, is taxed and, indirectly, we are taxed for the air we breathe. There is no accountability. An estimated $ 21 trillion has disappeared from the federal budget.
The rich pay next to nothing in taxes. I subscribe to Sheerpost.com and they recently published an article (compiled by ProPublica) about taxes on rich that you will hear a lot more about.
The article reveals tax avoidance tactics used by the financially wealthy. The rich essentially pay pocket money by avoiding income tax. They collect unrealized gains like stocks, bonds, and real estate, and then borrow money to live like royalty. You pay low interest on the loans and write them off as expenses.
They donate millions to charities that perpetuate and write off their reality. To avoid inheritance taxes on their children, they borrow money before they die to show debts and convert cash into unrealized gains. Tax law professor Edward McCaffery calls this “buy, borrow and die”. Corporate taxes are passed on to workers and consumers unless those profits and jobs are sent overseas to avoid taxes.
In 1916 there was one billionaire in America, today there are 614. There are well over 20 million millionaires in the US and more than 10% of them were founded in the last two years! The rich are responsible for all wars as they pay little to fund the Pentagon while making a profit on their investments in the military-industrial complex.
National debt is now well over $ 28 trillion and is estimated to be around $ 89 trillion in just 8 years! You don’t learn that from schoolchildren.
Mark Farris lives in Monroe. He can be reached at [email protected].