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JUNE 2006
Super-rich should stop complaining and pay their taxes
by Rick S. Bender, President of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO

Sen. Hillary Clinton recently strayed far enough from a prepared speech to accuse Generation Y of thinking "work is a four-letter word."  She later backtracked and apologized to today’s young adults, and rightly so.

From what I’ve seen, the American work ethic is alive and well, and continues to be passed from generation to generation.  Just as my parents taught me, I hope I have instilled in my children the values of hard work, playing by the rules and taking pride in the privilege, rights and responsibilities of living in America .

One of our responsibilities as Americans is to pay taxes.  You can’t have America without them.  Every patriotic American should pay their fair share to support their country.  Taxes are the way we support the common good, protect our citizens and defend our nation.

But Generation $ thinks “tax” is a four-letter word.

How else does one explain the brazen efforts in Washington , D.C. and in Washington state to repeal estate taxes, which would further shift the tax burden from the heirs of the richest of the rich onto the rest of us?

If not for the principled votes of Senate Democrats, including Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, the federal repeal would have succeeded.  We’ll have to wait and see if the wealthy local families bankrolling Initiative 920, which would repeal our state’s estate tax, are successful in buying enough signatures.

At a time our nation is at war and important domestic matters like port security and Medicare are underfunded, President Bush and Republicans in Congress very nearly succeeded in ramming through a $1 trillion tax break for the richest 0.27 percent of Americans.  This just weeks after they approved $70 billion in tax cuts on dividends and capital gains that will benefit primarily the wealthy.

What have you gotten?  About $156,000 in debt.

That’s how much in unpaid bills this borrow-and-spend Congress racked up in 2005 for every man, woman and child in America -- $760 billion total, according to the U.S. Treasury’s official Finance Report.  In just one year! 

“For a family, it's like having a $750,000 mortgage -- and no house,” said David Walker, the head of the Government Accountability Office, the official bookkeeper for Congress.

That debt is an obligation that will not end with our deaths.  It will be passed on to our children and grandchildren in the form of higher taxes and reduced government services.  Every additional dollar this Congress defers by giving additional tax breaks to our nation’s richest families adds to that debt.

Could there possibly be a worse time in our nation’s history to consider repealing the estate tax?  America is at war, bleeding red ink, and the disparity between our rich and poor is already too wide and growing.

Meanwhile, here in Washington state, repealing our estate tax would defund the Education Legacy Trust that pays for thousands of higher education enrollment slots and reduced K-12 class sizes, among many other things.  Washington has dropped to 46th out of 50 states in K-12 spending per $1,000 of personal income, and we’re considering cutting more education funding on behalf of our richest families?!

At a time our economy is supposedly firing on all cylinders, working class people feel less secure than ever because the cost of everyday living expenses like housing, gas and health-care are rising far faster than their paychecks.

The hubris it takes for right-wing conservatives to pursue such policies is astounding.  It’s time for working-class people to stand up against those who are driving our nation into a fiscal ditch.

And it’s time for the wealthiest families in Washington and the rest of America – the heirs of the superrich who won the birth lottery -- to stop complaining about their responsibilities to the state and nation that helped make their families rich.

Rick Bender is President of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO,
the largest labor organization in the state.

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Copyright © 2006  Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO