DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $600
Have you ever played the game of Monopoly? As an adolescent who was strangely addicted to the collecting of railroads, I noticed that there was a pattern and a rhythm to the game that seldom changed: Toward the end there would be one person who had virtually all of the properties and money. The losing players, realizing there was no longer any way to make a comeback, would admit defeat and call for the reshuffling of cards and a new beginning. It was THEN a predictable thing would happen. The big winner would start offering to loan money to everyone FOR FREE to keep the game going because he was having so much fun even though everyone else was bored and no longer wished to participate.
Am I the only one who has the feeling that the anticipated $600 rebates are really just a guise to continue an extremely lengthy Monopoly game in which our ultimate humiliation has been preordained.
God knows the working, or so-called “middle” class, has striven mightily over the years to stay in the game. The evolution of methods that have been used have used include:
1. In the fifties more and more mothers began to go into the work force after their children were in school.
2. In the 1970’s we began to see the “working mother” of school-age children enter the work force as parents became unavailable for daytime school functions while day care became a huge priority.
3. From the 1980’s on the American people became the hardest working people in the civilized world, working longer hours more productively than any other industrialized country. 4. In the 90’s, continuing the pretense of “making it” required a an infusion of cash, and the equity in our homes as well as the cahing in of retirement assets were just the ticket to provide breathing room. The downside was that behind the facade of continued consumption the average person’s debt to asset ratioo became distorted far beyond what could have been concieved of only a decade earlier.
5. In the same vein, the American people emulated their government and began to finance monthly expenses with credit cards.
According to the economist Robert Reich every method used has, in the long run, merely been stopgaps in an inevitable death spiral because we are ignoring the elephant in the room, the fact that the American working man and woman has not had a raise in thirty years. Even though their productivity has continued to increase for the entire time span they have benefitted little from their hard work. In the last seven year alone their buying power has decreased a thousand dollars while while those at the top have pocketed the entire gain in GDP.
One would have to wonder what the situation would be if, instead of lavishing tax breaks on the top 5%, the majority of the cuts had been instituted on payrolls for the last seven, or even the last thirty years. In other words, what if we had rewarded labor rather than capital for that period of time? As just an example, suppose “Joe Lunchbucket” had been allowed to write off his mileage to work while “Mr. Born in the End Zone who Believes he has Scored a Touchdown” had not received a full deduction for his corporate jet? Suppose we had not allowed the table to be tilted more and more to those President Bush refers to as “The haves, and the have-mores”? We will never know, because instead of real working class tax cuts we have gone with Rube Goldberg rebate schemes to try to create demand that should have already been in place.
Pat Buchanon in his recent column “Tapped Out Nation” describes the situation this way:
“Now, with the middle class tapped out, the home equity used up or declining, and mortgage, auto and credit card debt turning rotten, the U.S. government is going abroad to borrow 1% of GDP to hand out checks in May to get consumers buying again to prevent a recession. What kind of long term solution is this?”
Well, it isn’t a solution. It is a transparent attempt to put off an economic debacle until the next election. The American workers, who have had it stuck to them for the last seven years, are being asked to shut up and show their gratitude. We are all expected to ignore the dead elephant and continue to play a game we cannot, in the long run, hope to win. I, for one, believe it is high time to institute real changes in the tax code that would benefit those who work for a living. Now that would be REAL change that just might make a difference. I am not holding my breath in anticipation of this happening, but until it does, In words that paraphrase the great economic philosopher Johnny Paycheck, “Take this rebate and Shove it”.
