The City and State of New York are currently home to a battle between the people of New York and Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo and their corporate sponsors. This battle began when Bloomberg and Cuomo claimed that the city and state were “broke,” and that we are in a budget “crisis.” Their solution to this supposed problem is to take away benefits and funding from our workers, our institutions of higher education, and other areas of the budget that they call “bloated.” They intend to do this all without increasing taxes, even though raising taxes would increase government revenue, which in turn could go to funding said institutions.
As a result, they voted against the people to cut our “bloated” budget. Despite protests all over New York, both city and state, Cuomo refused to listen to his electorate. Essential services, such as medical care and education, will be neglected and left to rot because Cuomo and Bloomberg neglected the people they represent: teachers, doctors, workers in general, and of course, college students, who will feel the effects of the cuts every time they step into the classroom. This is all because we supposedly do not have the money to pay for these all-important services.
However, there is one source of tax revenue that the government and much of the mainstream media refuse to acknowledge: corporations and the super-rich. Despite what these sources tell you, our city, our state, and our nation have plenty of money. The only problem is that this money is not in the hands of the people and the government, the people who deserve the money, but in the hand of huge corporations. They are making record profits, while the rest of America, made up of Americans who are not making millions and billions of dollars a year, suffers. In other words, we the people are broke, our government at the moment is broke, but the corporations are raking in billions each year, and convincing our leaders that they are the “oppressed” group, and we, the workers and other people fighting for their rights, who just want basic benefits such as quality health care and a good education, are “thugs.”
Corporations already pay disgustingly low taxes, but about one quarter of them, such as Bank of America, do not pay any taxes whatsoever. In 2009, Bank of America paid absolutely nothing to the government in taxes, even though it raked in $4.4 billion that year. Not only did they make billions of dollars, but the government gave them $2.3 billion. Bank of America is only one of many examples of tax-dodging corporations who refuse to help out the people who actually need money.
Therefore, the solution to our money woes is not to make the working class and our institutions suffer by squeezing all of their life out of them, but to instead tax the rich more heavily and tax corporations, as well as eliminate any tax loopholes that the corporations constantly exploit to avoid paying taxes. For example, if Bank of America alone paid its fair share, the federal government would have $1.7 billion dollars more to invest in early childhood education programs such as Head Start.
We are not broke. Our country has plenty of money, but it is not in the hands of the people who need it most. Instead, it is in the hands of millionaires and billionaires who refuse to acknowledge the other 98 percent of America. All they care about is maximizing their profits and making sure the government does their bidding instead of fixing the real problems of our country. All we ask of the super-rich is to share a little bit of their profits with the American people. That isn’t too much to ask, is it?
