USW International Vice President Fred Redmond and progressive talk show host Leslie Marshall last week discussed the Republican tax reform proposal and the ways in which it overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy at the expense of working people.
The plan, Redmond said, is nothing more than the standard Republican orthodoxy.
“What this president’s done is dust off the old Republican playbook of trickledown economics,” Redmond said. “This is a tax plan that’s going to benefit millionaires and billionaires with very little for the middle class.”
Eighty percent of the benefits from the Republican proposal go to the top one percent of earners, leaving only 20 percent for the bottom 99 percent, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
Furthermore, “in order to pay for this, the irony is, we’re looking at cuts of up to $5 trillion in programs that are cherished by workers including Medicaid and Medicare,” Redmond said.
Time and again, trickledown economics has proven to be a scam. Republicans have tried to claim that cutting taxes for the rich and for corporations boosts middle class incomes before, but it has never worked.
“This isn’t some sort of Wall Street baptism where CEOs suddenly see the light and suddenly grasp the concept of paying workers a fair share of the profits,” Redmond said.
“Corporations have gotten tax breaks before and haven’t done anything in terms of rewarding the people who actually contribute towards making the profits. Instead what we’ve seen is that corporations push up CEO pay…while workers’ pay for the past three decades has flat lined,” said Redmond.
Instead the president and Congress should be looking for new ways to structure the tax code that directly helps the middle class. “Trickledown has been tried already, and it’s failed. We need a different approach that puts working people first,” Redmond said.
To hear the full interview, click here.