Is there a more blatant hypocrite in the Senate than Harry Brown? That a man known for his grim determination to cut Medicaid eligibility would pose as the poor man’s champion is galling enough. Worse still would be if, as the sales tax debate progresses, he is able to hide his continually regressive motivations.
“It’s becoming two North Carolinas,” thunders Brown. This kind of rhetoric steals liberals’ hearts. However, Brown is distorting reality. The true divide within society is between rich people and poor people. Just as land does not vote, places do not suffer or prosper. Poverty is a human experience.
Deprivation is felt most intensely in metropolitan counties. As Gene Nichol and Heather Hunt report, “the urban distressed are worse off than their rural counterparts.” The metropolitan poor own fewer homes, have less education and raise more children in poverty than anyone else. To portray metro counties as buzzing centers of universal advancement is simply false.
This indicates the basic dishonesty of Brown’s plan. He portrays it as an instrument of economic justice. But again, the poorest people in the state are in urban areas. Because sales taxes are regressive, steering more sales-tax revenue away from metros amounts to stealing from the poorest to give to rural residents across the income spectrum. Yet again, Harry Brown is trying to make the lives of the desperate harder for the benefit of many comfortable conservatives.
If Brown and his ilk cared about the poor–the rural poor included–they would expand Medicaid, reinstate the EITC, schedule a referendum on increasing the minimum wage, and take all future regressive tax cuts off the table. Of course, he would dismiss those proposals out of hand. Brown views exacerbating inequality as an important objective of governance., and the effect of his sales tax plan on the poorest merely confirms that reality.
Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.
It is going to take more than action at the voting both; the plan is to continue installing republikan operatives in public office statewide, and that is being accomplished undeniably by vote rigging – which electronic tabulation machines of all varieties make effortless by the companies suppling the machines. Isn’t it telling that all those companies are right-leaning businesses with ties to the republikan party? and these company’s machines are exempt from all verification procedures due to court established ‘trade secret protections! How are such instruments being allowed to tally the votes with absolutely no oversight? Aren’t we perplexed that no matter how awful these republikans behave ever more continue to occupy public office. The citizens need to make their voice heard NOW as in today – this is a well thought through and very intentional plan we see materializing before our eyes! The republikans have one goal, corporate governance – which is fascism.
Clearly, NCGOP cares for one group – the wealthiest among us. To position a higher sales tax as anything positive for the poor is simply a lie.
FYI – I’m hearing MANY middle-class NC residents grumble about the increase in state tax burden that they prepare their 2014 tax documents. Here’s to hoping that this grumbling and anger translates into action at the voting booth…
With many now discovering the harsh truth on their 2014 income tax returns, and with the NC Senate’s proposal to lower the corporate tax rate AGAIN, one would like to think that many NC’ers would bring some anger to the 2016 ballot box.
But, then again, many Dems and progressives truly thought that the NCGOP’s sequence of extreme legislation in 2013 and 2014 would bring a backlash in last November’s elections. Surely, one of the architects of it all, Tillis, would lose, and the most ineffective among the GOP candidates like Barefoot, would be ousted too. But it didn’t happen and the GOP stranglehold on the NCGA was just reinforced.
Overcoming the gerrymanders and getting the middle and lower economic class to not vote against their own best interests is a real challenge.