Who is supposed to share in the “shared sacrifice”?

by David Safier

Shared sacrifice? I keep hearing that's why union members should give up pay and benefits to share the sacrifice everyone else is making.

Shared sacrifice? The richest Americans screamed as if someone were threatening to cut off their right arms when people talked about returning their tax levels to what they were during the Clinton years. In a real sense, most workers have sacrificed a significant amount of their earning power in a redistribution scheme which transfered the lion's share of the nation's growing wealth from 95% of Americans to the top 5%. It's the simplest kind of math, though it's not usually part of the discussion. If there is a given amount of money in this country for compensation and an ever-greater proportion of it flows to the top, everyone else gets a lesser share. A reasonable sense of fairness dictates that a rise in the country's productivity and wealth should be shared among all who contributed to it.

If we broaden the meaning of the word "taxation" just a bit, you can say most Americans are being taxed, in the form of lowered incomes, to pay for the skyrocketing wealth of the richest among us.

To relate this to the situation in Wisconsin: government workers are being "taxed" by asking them to shoulder the economic burden of running government by returning some of their compensation — their salary and benefits — in the form of salary cuts.

Shared sacrifice? Start with the top earners who are now raking in robber baron-level incomes. Have them give some of their recent economic gains back in the form of a return to Clinton-era tax levels so government services don't have to be cut and the rest of the country can share in what has been, until 2008, our growing prosperity. Hell, that's not even sacrifice on their part. That will just make them merely "filthy rich" instead of "rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams of avarice."

We can see if restoring an earlier tax rate to the rich does enough to dig us out of our current mess and reestablish some kind of economic balance in this country. If not, we can look at other measures as well.