Lies, loopholes and lobbyists

Dear Editor,

About a year ago, I got a flier in the mail about a Patriotic Millionaires informational meeting. Lured by the free food, I went to that session, and learned it was a group of millionaires who thought they should be taxed more, and were exposing all the tax loopholes they, and other millionaires were using to not pay their fair share of taxes, and indeed, often paid taxes at a lower rate than someone working a blue collar job. They defined rich as anyone with a yearly income of $1 million, and/or assets of $5 million. They also talked about tax loopholes for giant corporations. Across multiple sessions they demonstrated how well meaning tax deductions, originally intended to help small businesses, had been exploited by corporations to save those corporations millions of dollars in tax payments.

In Wisconsin, the effects of millionaires and corporations not paying their fair share, while our property taxes have been drastically increasing year after year to make up the shortfall is especially evident. For example, in my city the government’s funding to the county had been cut by $800,000 per year since 2001 once inflation was taken into account …this oversight was only mostly corrected this past year. Our school district’s funding had been cut by $4 million per year since 2009 once inflation was taken into account, and the gap is still growing larger every year. Everyone knows the roads in Wisconsin need major work to get rid of the numerous potholes. These unfair tax loopholes for the rich didn’t seem right while our own property taxes have skyrocketed. In response, we formed our own non-partisan group called Economic Equity Now, to both increase awareness of the tax loopholes in existence, and to get our representative elected politicians to enact change in the tax code through voting.

As Morris Pearl wrote in the book How Lies, Loopholes, and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer, “I’m greedy for a country with a basic sense of fairness for my family and me to live in. I’m greedy for a country where good businesses thrive and hard work is valued and fairly compensated. Where people feel safe in their neighborhoods. Where parents can tell their children that they’re going to be okay and really believe it. I want to live in a country with lots of rich people and a huge middle class.” Ensuring the ultra wealthy pay their fair share helps keep the necessities we need to make our cities a great place to live in.

Aaron Dettmann

Richland Center, WI