I just sent this letter to my Senators in Washington DC, and while I don’t think Angus King needs to see it, I certainly hope it gets through to Susan Collins. It has been slightly edited to keep some details private:
Dear Senator Collins,
I implore you to vote against the tax plan now being contemplated in the Senate.
In the interest of time and space, I will list just some of my problems with this bill, in no particular order:
- massive cuts to Medicare and other valuable programs, as implied by the across-the-board cuts to prevent increases to the deficit
- loss of health care expense deductions (I have metastatic breast cancer)
- removal of the teachers' school supply deduction for which you yourself fought so hard only a year ago)
- the gross advantages given to the wealthiest Americans (including the President of the US) and their heirs
- the permanency of those advantages versus the transitory “breaks” given to the middle class and the poor
- the general contempt for the concept of every citizen paying their fair share of taxes for the benefit of future Americans, something that used to be everyone’s civic duty
- the average *increase* of taxes on all income groups earning less than $75K by 2027
- the absurd insistence that corporate tax breaks will provide jobs and wage increases, when nothing in the bill mandates it, reason laughs at the very idea, and history utterly refutes it
- the loss of deductions for student loans
- treating currently tax-exempt scholarships, fellowships, and fee waivers as taxable income
- loss of state and local tax deductions
- the repeal of the ACA mandate, which will increase both health insurance premiums and the number of uninsured Americans
If none of what I have written makes an impression, perhaps you might look at a recent LinkedIn piece written by former CEO David Mendels about how the argument that “massively cutting taxes for corporations will somehow translate into significant wage increases for working people [...] fundamentally disregards everything we know about how companies actually decide to hire and how much to pay their employees.”
Mr. Mendels describes recent decades in US history as seeing “a massive increase in corporate profits at the same time as we have seen stagnant wages. That increase in corporate profits has led to a record stock market and a dramatic increase in wealth for investors, not to significant increases in wages for working people.”
Senator Collins, Mr. Mendel is describing nearly my entire working life. I have been an IT professional since 1979, and my wages have been virtually frozen since the late 1980s. According to the COLA calculator at the website for the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the $XX,000 I was earning in 1988 should at least translate into $XXX,000 if I received only COLA increases.
But I did not. My current income is $YY,000 and trust me, that is not due to any inadequacies on my part. It is due to a severing of the relationship between productivity and compensation. A few years ago, the CEO of my company retired with a package worth $44M while we employees were being laid off or enduring wage freezes, and he got chump change compared to some golden parachutes we’ve seen.
Bear in mind that while my co-workers were being laid off, the work did not decrease, so those of us who were left were shouldering increasing burdens with no change in compensation, just the urgings of management to “do more with less” by “working smarter,” which just added insult to injury.
I would like to retire soon, as I’m about to turn 62 and as I said before, I have metastatic breast cancer and am trying to stay alive until a cure is found. But my wages have not kept up with COLA, my ability to save and invest has not been close to what it should have been for the last forty years, and even with employer-based health care insurance, my health-related expenses make retirement impossible since it pays only 80% of the bills, not 100%.
I am also old-fashioned enough to wish we could return to the idea that paying taxes is the responsibility of every American, particularly those who have most benefited from living in this great land and who have a special duty to pay it forward so that future generations can also have a strong infrastructure, civil protections, and the ability to focus on their health and happiness without the constant distraction of thinking it’s all going to be taken away by those who have theirs and want to pull up the ladder behind them.
Please do not believe what the Trump administration and long-debunked supply-siders are trying to convince you to do.
Please vote against this misbegotten tax plan.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
JBL55
Here’s hoping my letter-writing skills (which have gotten me published in the NY Times and read aloud on NPR’s Morning Edition) will serve us and future generations well.
(If you feel moved to comment on my diary, I will not be able to respond until later this evening. Thank you in advance for your feedback!)
