The U.S. Tax System: Rigged, Unfair & Fundamentally Unjust
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Democracy at Work
4.8 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 20 September 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
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[ S13 E 29]
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This week's update focuses on a systematic overview of federal, state, and local tax systems in the US to show the injustices built into corporate and personal taxation of income, spending and property.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic |
| 0:16.7 | dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolfe. Today is a special |
| 0:24.1 | program. I want to do nothing less than really go over taxes, the structure of the tax system |
| 0:32.4 | of the United States. I want to show you how it works. I want to show you what it's all about. And I want to expose the |
| 0:42.1 | genuinely enormous injustice that it represents. And that's what we're going to do, both in the |
| 0:50.1 | first and second half. Think of it as a kind of primer on the tax structure of the United |
| 0:56.5 | States. Let's begin. Taxes have been used for thousands of years by governments to raise the |
| 1:03.9 | money they need to do whatever is asked of those governments or what those governments want to do. |
| 1:10.3 | There is nothing new about taxes. And there was |
| 1:14.0 | always the same set of struggles around every tax system in every place that ever existed. |
| 1:23.4 | Here was the struggle. Who would have to pay the taxes and who would benefit from what the government did with the taxes it raised? |
| 1:34.3 | In other words, who would carry the burden of paying the taxes and who would get the benefit of what the government did with those taxes. And because every tax system |
| 1:47.3 | has always been a place of struggle, here's what we know is the ever-recurring pattern. |
| 1:55.0 | The rich and the powerful struggle to push the burden of taxes and to keep it off of them and onto the mass of people. |
| 2:06.5 | And likewise, the rich and powerful want the government to use the taxes it raises for their |
| 2:13.6 | benefit, first and foremost. And because they are the rich and powerful, they're in the |
| 2:20.3 | dominant position to shape how and what the government does. So they usually succeed. Maybe not all at |
| 2:28.8 | once, maybe not at the beginning, but over time, they push the burden of taxes onto the mass of people. |
| 2:37.3 | And likewise, over time, they get more and more of the benefits of government spending |
| 2:43.2 | that tax money on them, on keeping them rich and powerful. |
| 2:49.1 | So when I tell you that that's what happened in the United States, |
| 2:52.3 | I'm not telling you about anything that hasn't happened in many other places at many other times. |
... |
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