To Fight Inflation, Tax the Rich and Corporate Profiteers
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/10/22/fight-inflation-tax-rich-and-corporate-profiteers
by SAM PIZZIGATI. October 22, 2022
The world’s central bankers, almost without exception, are now busy swinging sledgehammers. Only whopping interest-rate hikes, they’re preaching, can pound down inflation’s rising prices.
In the United States, the Federal Reserve has so far this year raised the nation’s benchmark interest rate by three points, something that hasn’t happened since the 1980s, and still more rate hikes, the Fed pledges, are coming.
These interest-rate boosts, the central banker reasoning goes, will slow the economy, deflate consumer demand, and get prices shrinking. The downside? Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is readily acknowledging the hardships rate hikes are provoking. The slower growth and softer labor market rising rates make inevitable, Powell conceded this past August, “will also bring some pain to households and businesses.”
What our central bankers never acknowledge: that the real pain they’re causing falls only on working people. The Fed’s rate hikes, analysts at Bankrate point out, have “stark” implications for all consumers of modest means. Average households are facing far higher costs, for instance, on auto and home loans. Sinking demand from average consumers eventually translates into fewer jobs and fewer hours for those still working.
The rich, meanwhile, are doing just fine. They’re continuing to splurge, Bloomberg reports, on “pricey Chanel handbags, Dior jackets, and Cartier watches.” Deep-pocketed visitors to France are resting their weary shopping legs these days at the Cheval Blanc, a Paris hotel that charges $54,000 a night for a suite complex that comes with a pool and a private elevator.
U.S. lawmakers like Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts have introduced legislation calling for an excess-profits tax “to protect consumers from profiteering and stand against economic inequality.” The Ending Corporate Greed Act that Markey is co-sponsoring with Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Jamal Bowman would subject firms with over $500 million in annual revenues to a 95 percent tax on profits over and above their 2015-2019 profit levels, adjusted for inflation...
Our Federal Reserve’s top brass has no interest in confronting — or even acknowledging — the monopoly power that’s driving these price hikes. And the deeper the coming recession may be, some of the Fed’s cheerleaders seem to believe, the better...
A “level of unemployment that puts employers back in the driver seat,” as real estate CEO Jordan Kaplan noted this summer on a corporate earnings call, would be “good.”
Kaplan took home over $9 million last year.
by SAM PIZZIGATI. October 22, 2022
The world’s central bankers, almost without exception, are now busy swinging sledgehammers. Only whopping interest-rate hikes, they’re preaching, can pound down inflation’s rising prices.
In the United States, the Federal Reserve has so far this year raised the nation’s benchmark interest rate by three points, something that hasn’t happened since the 1980s, and still more rate hikes, the Fed pledges, are coming.
These interest-rate boosts, the central banker reasoning goes, will slow the economy, deflate consumer demand, and get prices shrinking. The downside? Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is readily acknowledging the hardships rate hikes are provoking. The slower growth and softer labor market rising rates make inevitable, Powell conceded this past August, “will also bring some pain to households and businesses.”
What our central bankers never acknowledge: that the real pain they’re causing falls only on working people. The Fed’s rate hikes, analysts at Bankrate point out, have “stark” implications for all consumers of modest means. Average households are facing far higher costs, for instance, on auto and home loans. Sinking demand from average consumers eventually translates into fewer jobs and fewer hours for those still working.
The rich, meanwhile, are doing just fine. They’re continuing to splurge, Bloomberg reports, on “pricey Chanel handbags, Dior jackets, and Cartier watches.” Deep-pocketed visitors to France are resting their weary shopping legs these days at the Cheval Blanc, a Paris hotel that charges $54,000 a night for a suite complex that comes with a pool and a private elevator.
U.S. lawmakers like Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts have introduced legislation calling for an excess-profits tax “to protect consumers from profiteering and stand against economic inequality.” The Ending Corporate Greed Act that Markey is co-sponsoring with Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Jamal Bowman would subject firms with over $500 million in annual revenues to a 95 percent tax on profits over and above their 2015-2019 profit levels, adjusted for inflation...
Our Federal Reserve’s top brass has no interest in confronting — or even acknowledging — the monopoly power that’s driving these price hikes. And the deeper the coming recession may be, some of the Fed’s cheerleaders seem to believe, the better...
A “level of unemployment that puts employers back in the driver seat,” as real estate CEO Jordan Kaplan noted this summer on a corporate earnings call, would be “good.”
Kaplan took home over $9 million last year.
