Tuesday, January 07, 2003

The Tax Cut and the 2 Million ton Cap So far in my blogging life, I have not alluded to my profession.  I have spent the past 25 years in the seafood industry—as a writer, where I produce a daily seafood industry news wire, as a market consultant and as business owner, with the only surviving seafood dot com company from a field that at one time held ten to twenty companies.   What has fisheries management to do with the Tax cut.  Well, both are about resource allocation, and there is tremendous pressure on fisheries managers to make short term decisions to provide more fish, at the expense of the long term health of the stocks.  I think you can see the analogy, where Bush’s wealthy backers grab for what they can when they have the chance, regardless of the long term impact on our democracy.   Most people don’t know that the best managed fishery in the world is in Alaska.  The Alaska pollock fishery is not only sustainable, but it has been producing healthy catches for more than a generation.  It is the largest food fishery in the world.  How has it been successful?   The key is something called the two million ton cap.  The Bering sea is very biologically productive, and if fishery managers added up the scientifically acceptable yield from all the different fisheries, the total would fluctuate, but in some years could surpass 3 million tons or more.  Yet very early on, the managers in Alaska determined that no matter what the status of individual stocks, no more than 2 million tons of fish would be landed each year.   When pollock stocks are healthy, as they are today and the catches are increased by a few hundred thousand tons, then the allowable catch of another species has to be reduced—either naturally through stock fluctuation, or through simply leaving the fish in the water.   When Republicans yell class war, it is disingenuous because the very heart of a democratic society is a social compact about how wealth is allocated.  Yes, there will be fights at the margins, and fights about whose company or industry gets the most federal subsidies, but a basic social compact has existed in the U.S. for more than 50 years, until recently.   That social compact essentially consisted of a progressive taxation system, where the people who had the highest incomes paid the highest share of taxes.  It ensured that basic social goods like retirement funding, education, infrastructure, and health were available to all.    The lesson of the two million ton cap is that we need similar clarity about division of wealth.  Look at the following data from the Census bureau, showing the change in share of national income from 1980 to 2001:    Bottom fifth            -19% Second fifth            -16% Middle fifth             -14% Second highest       -8% Top 20%               +15% Top 5%                 +42%   The bottom 80% of Americans lost ground in terms of share of income since the time of Ronald Reagan.  The top 20% gained some share of income, but the top 5% gained nearly 75% of all share of income given up by the bottom 80%.   This is not class war.  It is class rape.   The issue with the tax cuts should not be how much benefit goes to the wealthiest 1%, or whether dividends should be taxed or not.  The issue is whether we set a limit on income disparity, through an increasingly progressive tax.   Our cap should be to refuse any tax change, whether about dividends or the inheritance tax, that will further increase income disparity.   In fact, as the top 1% and the top 5% have gotten a greater share of national wealth, they have paid a greater share of federal taxes.  The figures, calculated from census data are:   Top 1 %, from 1990 to 2000:  share of income rose 79%, share of federal taxes rose 80%.  For the top 5% the figures are 28% and 30%.  Data source here.   However, these figures only are for federal taxes.  If state and local taxes were added in, since they are more regressive, the picture would be much worse.   So the tax issue is not really about who gets the most benefits.  It is whether we increase income inequality even further.   To preserve the long term integrity of our democracy, we need something like the 2 million ton cap in the Bering Sea.  We need a clear statement that we will not tolerate any federal program that increases income inequality, period.  Why can’t our democrats just say this? 10:33:06 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Toby Sackton. Last update: 2/2/2003; 5:54:53 PM.