Why America Needs Socialism by G.S. Griffin

Author:G.S. Griffin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IG Publishing
Published: 2019-01-15T16:00:00+00:00

Eleven

REVOLUTION

THOUGH OSCAR WILDE WROTE THAT SOCIALISM “touches the heart of one and the brain of another, and draws thus man by his hatred of injustice, and his neighbour by his faith in the future,”1 many practical questions need to be addressed if we are going to make socialism a reality in America.

The first question is financial. How will the country pay for universal healthcare, education, work or income, and other tenets of socialism? The answer is partly through budget reprioritization and partly through increased taxes on the rich. Let’s say, for example, we wanted to devote $400 billion to a UBI for the poorest third of American households ($9,500 for forty-two million households), plus $70 billion to make college free for all citizens. Where would we get $470 billion? First, we could shift resources away from the military, the largest annual discretionary expenditure in the US budget. Suppose we decided that we would spend $350 billion on the military per annum, rather than the $600 billion we currently spend. That would get us over halfway to our $470 billion goal, and still leave more than enough for our national defense—in fact, the US would still have the largest military budget in the world.2 Second, we could take $220 billion of the $360 billion currently granted to safety net programs (unemployment insurance, food stamps, Earned Income Tax Credits, Child Tax Credits, housing and energy bill assistance, etc.) and give it to this UBI program instead. Just like that, America has a UBI for a third of its families—a good start—and free college for all students. States and cities can help fund socialism, too, through budget reprioritization; the federal government may have a $4 trillion budget, but these entities spend $3 trillion collectively.

Universal healthcare, on the other hand, will not only require changes in how we spend current tax revenues, it will also require tax increases. However, these tax increases won’t cost the majority of Americans one extra cent. As we saw in the preceding chapter, the cost of universal healthcare in the US will be $3 trillion. Half of that cost is already covered in the form of federal, state, and local taxes that fund current healthcare programs (Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and so forth).3 Under a socialist system, these revenues and programs would be merged into Medicare For All. That leaves $1.5 trillion more to raise—and individuals and businesses will collectively spend this amount on taxes, rather than in the private healthcare sphere as they currently do.

Under the tax system of socialism, rich citizens and larger businesses, as the possessors of nearly all the money in this country, will pay higher proportions of their incomes—and indeed all wealth, including inheritances, investments, property, and so on. This, coupled with the elimination of tax loopholes and a crackdown on tax evasion, makes universal healthcare easy to afford. For instance, a new 5 percent tax on individual wealth over $5 million—affecting just 2 percent of US households—would add $1.5 trillion in annual tax revenue.4

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