I Owe My Soul to the Company Store

For 30 years now, taxes for the much wealthier among us have been dropping like the proverbial stone, while "the rest of us" get little, in comparison, in terms of tax decreases. Roughly, "we" "let them" cut taxes, mostly "their" taxes.

But at the same time, we collectively haven’t forced the feds to shrink government spending. When you throw in huge increases for military spending, including several wars that "we" haven't paid for with taxes, we get huge deficits. Throw in a huge recession (OK, depression) largely created by incredible failures-to-control-corporate-and- Wall Street-greed, which horribly depresses national income and thus cuts tax revenues and...and you get. . .

Enormous federal--and state--deficits, deficits that have only a little to do with the Bush's (yes, he started them) and Obama's attempts to stimulate the economy. So, what's the effect of all this for "us ordinary tax payers"?

Well, huge deficits. That means "we" borrow from...from people and corporations and other countries that, compared to most of "us," have money to lend. For simplicity, call "them" "The Company Store." And these require interest payments that. . .

Interest payments that take up larger and larger shares of the taxes we pay.

So, we, meaning, again, ordinary folks such as you and me, see more and more and more of our tax dollars going to finance, not governmental programs or even wars, DEBT SERVICE.

Yesterday, some big-shot journalist guesting on local NPR tells me that THE INTEREST REQUIRED TO PAY ON THE DEBT CREATED JUST BY BUSH THE YOUNGER'S TAX CUTS will consume SEVERAL MONTHS OF EVERYBODY'S FEDERAL TAXES.

Not only don't "the rich" pay anything like what they did in taxes, but "we" now have to pay them for the money that we borrow to make up for the new anti-Robin Hood tax code.

Larger shares of our yearly tax payments for debt service is just one expression of this. Of course another is the incredible credit card debt--when I was a boy these rates were illegal, considered to be "Unchristian usury". And so on. And the little bird in Kurt Vonnegut's tree goes "poo-tee-weet."

This all is just another way of pointing out the obvious: We owe our souls, increasingly, to the company store.

So. Keep voting for them tax cutting Republicans and Faux Dems. And keep buying their totally discredited-by-the-facts stories about "tax cuts paying for themselves" and "the economy will grow so fast that by piddle...oops, I mean trickle--down will take care of us all...

So, St. Peter, don't you call us, 'cause we can't go. We'll all owe our souls to the company store.