By Robin Lehman
Change always happens, but it can be good or it can be bad. It's not as if it was better back then. There are no good old days. But we used to talk about making our schools better, making them more inclusive, expanding access, essentially growing them. Now we talk about how to downsize them, make them cheaper. We built a road structure that was the envy of the world. Now we can't even maintain it because we have no money. We, all of us, went to the moon. Now we use that money to destabilize the Middle East through constant war. We used to argue about the best way to take care of the weakest of us; now we punish and degrade them. We, Republicans and Democrats, used to talk about how to expand access to voting, how to make it easier; now the Republicans are trying to restrict access to voting. Our universities were considered the best in the world. I worked my way through four years of college, graduating with no debt. That's now impossible. The list of things we did as a people goes on and on. And, when we talk about what we did as a people, we're talking about what we did through our government.
It's not that we didn't disagree with each other, it was that our conversations and arguments were how to do bigger and better things with our communal wealth. We had poisoned our air and water so Republicans and Democrats under Nixon came up with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and our immediate environment got better (the Ohio River no longer caught fire). There was a sense of rationality in our arguments.
But then, in the 1980s, the federal government became the bogyman. Now we are reaping the rewards of misunderstanding the nature of how we work together to accomplish great goals: government. When we owned our government it worked for us. But the very wealthy amongst us bought it away from us, convincing us that it was bad and inefficient. Now we don't want to do anything as a people, as fellow citizens, except make war on nearly everyone in the world. Reaganomics, austerity, trickle-down economics, whatever you want to call it, doesn't work. Cutting taxes to the wealthiest has brought us to poverty and inequality. Under Eisenhower (a Republican) the top income tax bracket was over 90 percent. The economy was booming. So we need to have a new conversation about what we as a people can do to restore our democracy and make a new sharing economy, replacing neo-liberal capitalism with a new economic socialism. So Bruce Hyde is right when he says that we can't count on the federal government. It's been eviscerated through 35 years of Republican-led cuts. The things we used to do at a national level now need to be done at the state level. Here are some things we can change in Vermont. All these things have been tried elsewhere and are successful.
Raise the minimum wage to a living wage: $15 per hour (more money to spend, more taxes collected).
Institute a Vermont public bank: The money we borrow for infrastructure goes right back to us.
Raise the top income tax bracket and get rid of tax loopholes for the wealthiest of us.
Pass the tax on carbon pollution sponsored by Energy Independent Vermont (save the environment and create jobs).
Robin Lehman lives in Warren.
