This was just now, in response to a petition (americansfortaxfairness.org) that I just now replied to.
These petitions, if you're writing to your Representative and/or Senators, all usually include some standard fare. Those parts, in this posting, will be highlighted as quotes.
Without further ado, here's my petition response, with my own input in plain text:
Dear Senator,
I learned in grade school that it was and is important to share.
The teachings of Jesus say "look after the least of these."
Yet we have a millionaire, multi-millionaire, billionaire class for whom too much is never enough.
None of them are self-made. They built their fat cat business empires by someone else doing the work, and based on centuries of discoveries and inventions that are the legacy of all of humanity, not just some hypothetical "select few."
What we humans have made, it is a wealth common to all of us. We are all in this together. This is a commonwealth in the archaic and best sense of the word.
It does NOT belong to today's robber barons, and I am mad as hell that the robber barons just keep stealing more and more of what someone else built for them for us for EVERYONE.
You need to repeal all those obscene tax giveaways to the filthy rich ASAP.
We are in an unprecedented time of CRISIS, nationally and globally. It is high time, way past high time, one minute to midnight time: high time that today's Gilded Age robber barons STOP this charade, this nonsensical pose, this fairy tale idea, that they are somehow ENTITLED to those obscene amounts of money, this vicious power grab that would send the rest of humanity into chaos, into some kind of hell.
To me, the ruthless, endless, voracious pursuit of more and more money and power is akin to a mental illness, perhaps even a severe psychosis.
This HAS to stop!
Nearly 43 million Americans are recently unemployed due to the pandemic. Plummeting tax revenue is threatening state and local services, including healthcare, public education and sanitation, at a time when demand is skyrocketing because so many people are in need.
At the same time, we’re seeing more and more of the pandemic response going to the top 1% just as the nation’s 630 billionaires saw their personal wealth increase by $434 billion in the first two months of the pandemic, according to news reports.
We need a pandemic relief and recovery plan that puts unemployed Americans and state and local services first.
The $3 trillion HEROES Act, recently passed by the House, puts about $900 billion toward state and local public services and another $117 billion toward state funding of Medicaid -- just as millions of unemployed Americans are losing their healthcare.
The HEROES Act also generates $250 billion in revenue by closing the Millionaires Giveaway -- an outrageous loophole that is giving 43,000 millionaires an average tax cut of $1.6 million this year alone, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
I urge you to immediately pass legislation in the Senate that prioritizes aid to state and local governments to keep services flowing, repeals the tax cuts for the rich that were included in the CARES Act and rejects additional tax cuts for the rich and corporations.
Thank you for putting the needs of our communities first.
That was it, as far as the petition goes, as regards my reply.
The remainder of this posting (which I've italicized) is a short essay I wrote about five months ago, also, as it turns out, in response to a petition (Tax the Rich). This was, of course, written prior to the present crisis. But it still resonates, in my opinion. (And it also dovetails with my first posting, "What We Should Have Learned From the Global Pandemic"—read it if you like.) Anyway, here's my "Tax the Rich" petition response:
The income tax, when it was first initiated, was a tax ONLY on the very wealthy. It was only later on that the rank and file workers had to pay some percentage of their income, as well.
Our most prosperous times, economically, have historically been during times when the marginal tax rate for the very wealthy was as high as 70-90% or more.
We are in dire need of policies, with regard to both taxation and regulation, that will support the type of society we wish to live within.
In particular, we need to prevent companies from becoming too big, and we need to prevent individuals from amassing too much wealth, power, and influence.
Yet we seem to live within a society wherein the largest corporations and the wealthiest individuals are suffering from a kind of hoarding syndrome. Like the eccentric person you hear about who fills their house with clutter, until it is unliveable. But in the case of the wealthy persons, human or corporate, the psychosis is about money, about a greed that can never be satisfied.
But, if you examine how this excessive wealth was accumulated, in most or all cases it was not because of someone being a self-made man, or whatever. Everything that has ever been accomplished by human beings has been built on whatever their predecessors had already accomplished.
We live, or ought to live, in a commonwealth, such that we provide for the common good of ALL, not just the top 1% or so. None of the accomplishments of the very rich and powerful could have been done without the infrastructure that supports it all, nor without the scientific and cultural advances that preceded the accomplishments in question.
Moreover, our economy, when it works best, is a FLOW of money, goods, and services. The excessive accumulation of money is actually a force that constricts that flow. The ones who will reinforce the flow are those who spend most of what they earn.
Reaganomics has never been proven to work. Tax cuts for the already wealthy only ever result in ever more hoarding and greed.