At that point or now, thinking through it can we recognize the answer that's left (in every sense of the word) and obvious: From the same place we always actually have got the moneythe political decisions of whatever public authority has the power to say "the following sums are allocated."
As a socialist, my goal isn't to make billionaires pay; it's to make them disappear. Even short of socialism, I'm in favor of a robust social-democratic taxing policy that establishes an effective minimum and maximum income and wealth policy, which would entail imposing confiscatory taxes on upper tiers of income. I have no contradiction there with my promotion of SS&M and other robust social-democratic policies, because I know we don't need the money of the wealthy to buy them.
I understand that probably most leftists are still reluctant, as I was for a long time, to accept the assertion that taxes don't fund government spending, though I'd say it's staring us in the face as an empirical policy fact. We've just seen what $4-6 trillion having created out of the very real power of the purse, too blithely dismissed as "thin air." It certainly didn't come from "taxpayer dollars."
Still the assertion contradicts a deeply-ingrained paradigm, within which leftists have developed a comfortable, and often effective, discourse of reform. I get and respect the resistance from those who really are not persuaded. It's either right or wrong, and the debate about it is ongoing and necessary.
Less palatable to me are those on the left who say: "You're right, of course, taxes don't fund government programs. But we can't say that. People just won't understand. We have to stick with the what everyone's familiar with."
Really? "I know the truth, but I can't/don't want to explain it to them, the working class comrades I claim to be fighting for and with. They won't understand it. We have to keep stringing them along with a false narrative." You can't handle the truth! is a position for the left? Not a good look.
One of the main reasons why leftists don't want to accept, or admit they accept, that taxes don't fund government programs is that they think accepting that notion surrenders any argument for taxing the rich. In fact, it just changes the reasons why we must tax the rich not because we need their money for anything, but because they're too rich, and that gives them too much political power. You don't let individuals hoard a $100 billion of socially-created wealth for the same reason you don't let them have an atomic bomb. We surtax the rich to limit material and political inequality (and inflation), and that's a perfectly good reason in itself. We don't need their money, but we have the right to take it. Because we, as a polity, literally made it. It's actually quite simple, and not hard to explain.
Will the rich use the notion that we don't need their money to pay for programs as an argument to oppose taxation? Duh, yeah they will, as they use any argument for that purpose like, you know: "Why do we have to pay for everything to cushion the lives or all those non-taxpaying moochers with our hard-earned taxpayer dollars?"
We are going to have to fight them about taxes, along with everything else, no matter what. There is no trick or formulation or accounting entity"trust funds" included that is going to stop the wealthy from demanding their right to suck up all the wealth of society. And the Roosevelt Ruse not only won't stop them from undermining SS&M, it is the Achilles heel that the neo-liberals target, and will eventually hit, to take those programs down. It's not "If we terminate the payroll tax, we will terminate the program"; it's "if we don't terminate the payroll tax, it will terminate the program."
Does everyone not recognize the truth that "the supposed Trust Funds have now become the weak point for Social Security and Medicare"? Everyone should, since it's been evident for a long time. I am not in the slightest bit fooled about where the Republicans led by Trump, Mnuchin, or whomever are going to go on SS&M, no matter what any of them are saying now. They are going to revert to the neo-liberal, austerian, deficit-fear-mongering paradigm. They are, that is, going to go to exactly the same place Obama the Obama-Biden Administration was when Mike Norman wrote that in 2014, where Biden has been for 40 years and any Biden-Harris administration will be, and where Hillary met Pete at the intersection of Peterson Way and Clinton Avenue. They're going to go right to the trust funds (bankrupt!) and the payroll taxes (insufficient!) to prove we have to cut, er, "save" SS&M.
Nor, however, am I foolish enough to think that meeting them on that ground debating how to make the SS&M business "solvent" is going to work to my advantage. That's exactly where they want me to be. The left has to stop arguing within precisely the economic framework that everyone from FDR to Stephanie Kelton have dismissed, but the Pete-Peterson RepubliDems love. We should take every opportunity including any formulations some politician might inadvertently or opportunistically give us to shift the ground of debate.
In the present circumstance, that means saying something like, "You're right. The payroll tax isn't necessary. In fact, ' The Treasury can pay out all that Social Security provides while the accountants declare the funds more and more in the red.' And the same is true for Medicare, and any Medicare-for-all program. Thanks for pointing that out. Now, let's make it so for everything."
This issue, like too many others over the past four years, is dominated by reactive politics, by instinctive and instant revulsive reactions to Donald Trump. Trump has been a bird in the house of American politics for four years. Let's not allow him to become a bird in the house of our minds.
Social Security and Medicare have been under attack for decades, at least as much from Democrats as from Republicans. Donald Trump didn't start the fire to burn them down, and nothing he has done or said about them has been anywhere close to as damaging to SS&M as Obama's almost-successful "Grand Bargain" initiative or Biden's constant carping. Nothing anyone has said about Social Security in the last year is truer than Trump's remarks that Biden has a " terrible record " on Social Security and " Democrats are going to destroy your Social Security ." The problem isn't Donald Trump. The problem is the neo-liberal austerity paradigm that the Republicans who will push Trump where they want him to go, and the Democrats, and everybody on the left or right who is clinging to the payroll tax/trust fund ploy is embracing and perpetuating. It's not social democracy; it's soft left neo-liberalism.
If, in the present crisis, the left can't seize on any statement or action that can free social programs from the absurd constraints of the payroll-tax/trust-fund scheme that "embody[s] to as great an extent as possible the principles of capitalism"well, that will be one more opportunity given by this unprecedented crisis which the left has failed to turn into the kind of change that is as radical as reality.
Payroll taxes are a bad idea. And it's the progressive left's stubborn defense of them and the paradigm they sustain, not Trump or Mnuchin's insouciance about them, that poses the greater danger to the future of Social Security, Medicare, and all such programs.
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