Whoever Said Republicans Fight Inflation Better Than Democrats?

By JOHN GEYMAN

Republicans are blaming Democrats for the inflation that is occurring in this country. Filled as they are with lies and disinformation during the 2022 midterm election campaigns, they falsely claim that they can fight inflation better. That is in full denial of the opposite—Democrats brought up and passed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, while Republicans and their policies over so many years are themselves major contributors to inflation, as shown by these points that they want to overlook:

• The GOP tends to vote against legislation that would rein in corporate profiteering, such as Senator Elizabeth’s Warren’s Prohibiting Anticompetitive Mergers Act;

• They turn a blind eye to unbridled corporate greed and profiteering;

• They support tax avoidance by the wealthy;

• They oppose tax reform that would tax the wealthy at a higher rate while the wealth of US billionaires has surged by $1.8 trillion during the COVID pandemic.

• They oppose increases in the minimum wage, which has led to low-income workers falling far behind and increasing income inequality;

• The salaries of the top CEOs of the Fortune 500 largest companies were about 12 times that of average workers in their business in the 1940s; they are now often 300 times that number.

• The $4 trillion in total wealth of all U. S. billionaires is nearly double the $2.1 trillion in total wealth held by the 165 million Americans in the bottom half of the population.

Corporate greed is a major contributor of inflation in this country, as evidenced by these examples:

• Big Oil: After Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, Big Oil directed massive profits to its shareholders through increased dividends and other manipulation of stock prices, leading to higher prices of gasoline at the pump.

• Pharmaceutical industry: Facing the likelihood of future congressional legislation requiring Medicare to negotiate drug prices, Big PhRMA raised the prices of 300 prescription drugs at the start of 2021.

• Wheat and food supplies. During today’s crisis of famine around the world, commodity traders on Wall Street have been working to increase their prices, likely by 10 to 25%.

Here are examples of the increasing inequities that have developed under GOP leadership:

• The richest 0.1% now own 19% of US national wealth, approaching levels of the late 1920s, while their average tax rate approximates that of the bottom 90% of Americans.

• Since 1975, according to the Rand Institute, some $50 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of our population to the top 1%.

• National income from corporate taxes is near an all-time low of just 1% since 1920, while individual tax revenue is about 9 times as high.

Over the last several decades, the ideology within the Republican and Democratic parties has hardened and become more polarized and divisive. A 2014 study by the Pew Research Center found that 36% of all Republicans (66% of those consistently conservative) saw the Democratic Party as a threat to the nation’s well-being. Most polls now find that one-half or more of Republicans believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen as their party has been active in putting more than 30 laws in place that restrict access to polling places, the number of days for voting, and the availability of absentee voting.

As Jim Hightower, author of The Hightower Lowdown, has noted:

“The true political spectrum in this country is not right to left, it’s top to bottom. A bright progressive future awaits us if we join hands with the great progressive, racially inclusive majority of workaday people who’re no longer in shouting distance for the economic and political elites at the top.”

Further, as Bill Moyers has observed:

“More and more people agree that growing inequality is bad for the country, that corporations have too much power, that money in politics is corrupting democracy and that working and poor communities need and deserve help when the market system fails to generate shared prosperity. Indeed, the American public is committed to a set of values that almost perfectly contradicts the conservative agenda that has dominated politics for a generation now.”

In their 2020 book, “Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality,” political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson identify these three threats when inequality reaches extreme levels, as it certainly has: (1) power shifts to economic elites, (2) their interests diverge from those of their fellow citizens, and (3) they become more apprehensive about democracy. We can make a case that much of that has already happened, and that GOP’s current efforts on voter suppression, attempting to put fake electors in place, and other efforts to manipulate the vote at local and state levels represent the GOP’s “apprehension about democracy.”

Let’s hope that all of the current efforts by the GOP to lie and cheat their way to the midterms and 2024 election campaigns will be overcome by high voter turnout in the best tradition of the American way.

John Geyman, MD, is professor emeritus of family medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, Wash.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2022

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