AMILE WILSON
from page 20
Jackson labor supporters Pitiya Selvanayagan, left, and Carrie Wong protest Wisconsin Republicans’ move to bust labor unions in March.
April 6 - 12, 2011
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Michigan League for Human Services heavily criticizes Gov. Rick Snyder’s plan to cut the Michigan Earned Income Tax Credit. “The Michigan EITC keeps 25,000 people in working families out of poverty, including 14,000 children,” MLHS said in a March 15 statement. “Ending the EITC will push these children into poverty and worsen poverty for 700,000 people.” The league added that Snyder’s overall tax proposal is “10 times harder on poor families than that of wealthy families, mainly because of the elimination of the EITC.” The Snyder plan, they say, reduces taxes on business by 86 percent, while increasing taxes paid by individuals up 31 percent. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy released its own data in March showing that Snyder’s plan increases the tax burden upon the lowest 20 percent income households earning less than $17,000 by 1.1 percent, but only increases the personal income taxes of the state’s wealthiest individuals, (those earning $335,000 or more) by 0.1 percent. Rozman said the changes in Wisconsin, Michigan and some other states signal the spread of age-old southern tradition, which never squared happily with the New Deal or the middle class. “The New Deal is unraveling, and there’s no side defending it anymore,” Rozman said. “Democrats do not really have a left wing in this country anymore. Labor was destroyed and its numbers went down dramatically, and the Democratic Party moved to the center, or even center right. There are individual progressives, but there is no clear message that people are able to identify.” It’s not really a difficult thing to defend. People generally say government is spending too much, but when you ask them what programs they want cut, they generally choose chimerical budget sinkholes that never made a difference in the first place. “Usually, they choose things like foreign aid—like it takes up 25 percent of the government, even though it’s more like 25 percent of 1 percent of the budget, something like that,” Rozman said.
“They want to cut in general and in principal, but when you use specifics, no. They defend it. They defend public education. They defend Social Security, all the government safety-net programs, despite Republicans’ increasing call to cut programs to reduce the (federal) deficit.” Senior-citizen advocate group AARP conducted an opinion poll on the 75th anniversaries of Social Security’s founding and learned that people still have high regard for Roosevelt’s program and most adults (seven in 10, actually) strongly oppose cutting spending on Social Security, even if the cuts serve to reduce the federal deficit. A March Bloomberg News National poll revealed that the public overwhelmingly opposed significantly cutting education programs, including No Child Left behind, Head Start and subsidies for college loans by 77 percent. Seventy-six percent of people polled also opposed reducing benefits for Medicare, and 62 percent opposed significantly cutting the much disparaged Environmental Protection Agency. But while the masses appear to want to preserve social programs, the leaders of the movement to remove the New Deal—to essentially southernize the North—have an easier time of tearing down things as complicated and multi-faceted as a federal budget, and the Democrats don’t have a clear game plan to defend the sand castle. “It’s very difficult to be pragmatic in the face of true believers, the ones who are behind the demolition of the Deal, who know exactly what they want, which is to be the ‘Party of No,’ to destroy what exists and create a survival-of-the-fittest society,” Rozman said. Meanwhile, Barbour, a former tobacco lobbyist whose firm Barbour, Griffith and Rogers earned millions peddling the interests of corporations, is touching down in the Midwest and other spots this month, selling to American voters what appears to be an increasingly popular southern strategy of a different bent. His next appearance could be the White House. Brace yourself, Yolanda. Comment at www.jfp.ms.