Unstable funding
Editor, The Commercial:
I often read columns that complain of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid funding problems. Those programs were all set up many years ago and were funded with payroll taxes on American workers. They were set up with dependable funding streams.
Then Mitt Romney’s Private Venture program, and numerous others began exporting (offshoring) American jobs to low wage countries for the profit gained thereby. Profits for them have been enormous. Those profits they gained should have been taxed to fund the programs they’d taken the funding stream away from. They were not.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Principally, that was caused by the Supreme Court making Citizens United, a removal of limits of political donations, legal. That allowed corporations and lobbyists to, in effect, bribe the Congress through campaign donations. We saw our government sold to big corporations and their stockholders. They hold the votes of Congress hostage to their money supply.
Any chance of any Congress voting to tax corporate profits to pay what they took out of the funding stream of the country’s social safety nets? Not much!
Spending needs to be controlled of course — but those who took the funding stream away need to be held to account and pay those taxes that are needed. And the truth needs to be published about it all.
Karl Hansen,
Hensley