Genuine question - why is taking benefits away from the poorest among us the only answer? Corporations and the wealthy upper crust have made record profits YoY for like a decade now. But we can only find the money by taking it away from people who are just trying to eat?
Entitlements and interest on the debt itself make up the majority of spending.
Most corporations don't make extraordinary profits. They make enough to stay in business, and if you tax them too heavily they will either raise prices or just close. So higher corporate taxes will ultimately depress business and be paid for by the consumer.
A few corporations certainly do make a lot of profit, and various "windfall profit" or "excess profit" taxes have been tried, but that's more about politicians trying to earn favor than anything that makes a practical difference.
Spending is the thing that's out of control, so that's where the problem must be attacked.
> Most corporations don't make extraordinary profits. They make enough to stay in business, and if you tax them too heavily they will either raise prices or just close.
Corporate taxes are levied on profit, not revenue. Raising corporate taxes would not cause any businesses to fail. And businesses can only raise prices if the market will bear those higher prices. Prices are set based on what customers will pay, not on what profit margin the company wants.
> Raising corporate taxes would not cause any businesses to fail.
It is a little more nuanced than that. Raising corporate taxes can make it harder for businesses to succeed if it sharply reduces after-tax profits or discourages investment. OTOH, if done well, the incremental tax revenue can create a healthier business environment overall.
because the poorest don't have the power to stop anyone taking their benefits whereas being rich by definition is having access to levers of power like the courts and political contributions and have also been running what is essentially a multigenerational PR campaign that says that the poorest among us are the source of all of our problems and that eliminating any help for them will simultaneously make things better for us by cutting spending and make things better for them through vague notions of encouraging responsibility or whatever.
tldr - the reason that going after the poor is always the answer is that it's the rich who are both asking and answering the question.
SNAP should be the last thing that gets reformed, aside from its tendency to fund less than ethical corporations (coca-cola, big agribusiness, Taco Bell). On that I totally agree.
The wealthy boomers who own multi-million dollar California track homes and don’t pay taxes because of prop 13, who are consuming millions on quasi-necessary medical procedures because they partied too hard in the 70s, gorged on trans fats in the 80s, smoked drank and didn’t go for walks, that’s where entitlement reform should start. But those are the base of one, maybe both parties and will vote out anyone that refuses to subsidize their ozempic and knee surgeries. They will even vote to reduce democracy by gerrymandering the state to block third party candidates and ensure nobody can come for their unnecessary health care costs and other ballooning entitlements.
It’s not the only answer. There are no good answers, that’s the unfortunate truth. An empathic government would avoid getting us to this point, but alas here we are.
