Tax Dollars Can Buy Happiness

By LEO GERARD

Corporatists have sought to shame two clear-eyed lawmakers in recent weeks for daring to offer prescriptions to cure America’s rampant economic anxiety.

“Stupid” is what they tried to call new Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as she became the youngest woman ever to serve in the US House.

“Unlikeable” is what they wanted to peg on US Sen. Elizabeth Warren as she began exploring a run for the presidency.

Right-wingers and one percenters felt they had to try to crush Ocasio-Cortez, Warren and others whose ideas promote dignified jobs with living wages, universal health insurance, affordable access to pre-K and college degrees and a national sense of social cohesiveness.

That’s because in capitalist America, where there are summer homes and pleasure boats for the wealthy, there is no rest for the weary and worried. The rich and corporations get massive tax breaks, and the 99%? Well, they get stagnant wages, growing bills and constant angst.

How can families afford health care? How can they pay the rising cost of daycare? How can twenty-somethings ever afford a home while paying off extortive college loans? Will the elderly avert the indignity of meals made of cat food as corporations eliminate pensions? Worry. Worry. Worry. So many are so miserable in the richest country in the world.

By contrast, year after year, the denizens of Denmark are found to be among the happiest people in the world.

In Danish, the word “hygge” describes the feeling of well-being a person gets when surrounded by friends and family, supportive and caring neighbors and co-workers, all participating willingly in a tax-supported system that provides the safety and security of high-quality basic services, such as healthcare and education for all. Hygge can’t be individually purchased and produced with scented candles or home security systems. It’s a common good.

Americans don’t have hygge. They have anxiety. For good reason.

Forty percent of American adults don’t have enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense. Despite low unemployment, 45% of Americans rate the economy as poor or only fair. Their economy does not include corporate jet rides and $5 million vacation penthouses in London. For 4.8 million Americans, their economy is forced part-time work without benefits when 40 hours is essential to cover the bills. If there’s something stupid, it’s this economic pain suffered by so many in the richest country in the world, not Ocasio-Cortez’s plans to relieve that pain.

And let’s talk unlikeable. Despite that low unemployment rate, there’s a frighteningly high unemployment rate among men aged 25 to 54. That’s men in their prime. That’s men who want to work. That’s men who have lost family-supporting jobs as corporations like Carrier and GM moved factories to Mexico. That’s men in their 50s forced out of jobs, then unable to get new work as corporations refuse to hire older workers. That’s men who commit suicide and suffer addiction – and overdose deaths – at rates so high that life expectancy in the richest country in the world is declining. That’s tragic. And deeply unlikeable – not Elizabeth Warren’s proposed remedies for that pain.

In Denmark, hygge is achieved in part with tax rates that are consistently among the highest in the world. These levies provide a sense of safety and security for Danes that is unimaginable for most Americans. That includes free university tuition, universal healthcare, generous unemployment benefits and 52 weeks of paid leave shared by new parents.

So yes, collective social spending buys happiness.

A study by Baylor University showed that’s true in America, too. The researchers found Americans are happier in states where taxpayer money is spent on public goods like libraries, parks, highways and natural resources.

Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren and a growing number of Americans contend we deserve some hygge of our own. They differ on how to get there. Some would like to increase the income of the 99%, enabling them to buy what they need. Some want to tax corporations and the one percent at the high rates paid in the 1950s and 1960s to cover the costs of public services.

Either way or some of both, American hygge is possible.

Elizabeth Warren, born in 1949, grew up in the years when the rich paid 70 to 90 percent marginal tax rates. Much of that money went to pay down the debts of World War II. But it also paid for the benefits in the GI Bill, including college and trade school tuition, veterans hospitals and low-interest mortgages. Between 1945 and 1966, a fifth of all new single family homes were financed by the GI loan program.

When Warren was 12, her father, a salesman for the Montgomery Ward stores, suffered a heart attack. Medical bills piled up. The family car was repossessed. Warren’s mother, fearing foreclosure, went to work at Sears at the age of 50 for minimum wage. That $1.15-an-hour job saved the family’s home. That’s when minimum wage was worth more. At its peak in 1968, the rate was worth $8.68 in inflation-adjusted dollars. It has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, losing almost 10% of its value due to inflation.

Today’s minimum wage for full-time work will not keep a mother and her child out of poverty, won’t cover the rent on a two-bedroom apartment, won’t provide for a family’s basic survival.

Warren wants a minimum wage sufficient for a family of three to live on. She says a government that works for the people should ensure the minimum wage is sufficient to give workers a shot at climbing into the middle class.

She wants other wages and benefits to rise as well, and one way she proposes to do that is to require that 40% of corporate board members be elected by workers. She introduced legislation requiring that for very large corporations. The idea is to make corporations more accountable to employees, customers and communities. If 40% of board members were worker representatives, corporations would be less likely to stiff the pension fund, move manufacturing to Mexico or pay the CEO 1,000 times the earnings of the average worker.

Ocasio-Cortez approaches the problem differently. She wants the government to provide services, as Denmark does. Taxes would be higher, particularly for the 1%, but other costs would be lower or disappear, such as health insurance premiums and college tuition.

Ocasio-Cortez worked low-wage jobs as a restaurant server and bartender to support herself. She knows the stress. And she knows it’s wrong. She says, “When you can’t provide for your kids working a full-time job, working two full-time jobs, when you can’t have health care, that is not – that is not dignified.”

The Green New Deal she is promoting is much more than a plan to decarbonize. It is a holistic program to establish a more fair and just economy. It would ensure that workers are trained and prepared to transition to a clean energy world and guarantee workers’ right to unionize. It would apply special focus to historically impoverished, marginalized and deindustrialized communities. To promote economic security, it would include basic income programs, universal health care and a living wage job guarantee to every person seeking employment.

That would cost a lot. Hygge can be expensive. But Americans deserve it, just as much as Danes.

Leo W. Gerard is the International President of the United Steelworkers (USW) union. He also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. Follow him at twitter.com/uswblogger.

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2019

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