“I can’t help but wonder if the real desire behind the tax bill is to end social mobility completely. It’s all to keep people in their place.”
-Catherynne Valente
She’s not wrong. What the proposed tax bill does targets all the things that heretofore allowed you to avoid living hand-to-mouth as a subsistence worker. Blowing away the home mortgage interest deduction makes home ownership more expensive than renting. Messing with 401(k) in a world that already did away with defined-benefit pensions takes away any prospect of retiring in comfort. Removing the deductibility of student loan interest makes higher education an even greater burden, but one that if not borne prevents you being able to get anything other than hourly work forever.
It’s difficult not to feel like the last two or three recessions were all about giving business the excuse to cut until we were left with nothing but walking wounded. Outsource everything that isn’t a core function. Your general services, your IT, your facilities, even your payroll and HR – all that is shuffled off to one contract or another. Create a permanent level of structural unemployment and you can start cutting salary and benefits and any kind of security, because you should just be grateful to have a job at all.
This isn’t accidental, this isn’t inadvertent – this is the whole plan. The goal is to perpetuate financial insecurity. Because when you don’t have financial security, you have to take whatever you’re offered. If you have student loans you can’t write down, if you have no benefit for home ownership, if you’re going to bear the whole brunt of medical emergencies, you can’t afford to roll the dice. You can’t leave and build your own business. You can’t risk a bird in the hand. So the bosses and the owners can keep more for themselves and you can scuffle for peanuts, because what’s the alternative? Strike out on your own and if you don’t make it, you’re cooked.
The entire organizing principle of this tax bill is 99% of America saying “please sir can I have some more?” Forever. It’s a piss-poor way to run a country, but then, we’re proving to be a piss-poor country.