Back to Work - Bill Clinton [39]
Most of these people are grateful for their success and know that because of current economic circumstances, they’re in the best position to contribute to solving our long-term debt problem and to making the investments necessary to restore our economic vitality. Many of them supported me when I raised their taxes in 1993, because I didn’t attack them for their success. I simply asked them, as the primary beneficiaries of the 1980s growth and tax cuts, to help us balance our budget and invest in our future by creating more jobs and higher incomes for other people. They’re smart enough to know that they can’t continue to prosper on the escalator of our increasing inequality without fundamentally weakening America and killing the goose that laid their golden eggs.
Of course, there are also a lot of other people who’ve done well, think they were entitled to all the tax cuts, and see no connection between the concentration of income and wealth at the top, the decline of both middle-class and low-income workers, and the jobless growth pattern of the last decade.
Some of them are bankrolling the antigovernment crowd. That helps to explain some of the positions its members of Congress have taken that seem inconsistent with their rhetoric. For example, the antigovernment members of Congress railed against the financial bailout, but they support repeal of the financial-reform bill, thereby stripping government regulators of their power to make banks hold more capital to cover higher risks, increasing the likelihood of future financial failures. The bill also bars future bailouts and establishes a procedure for orderly bankruptcy instead. They want to repeal that too.
Here is a different example of a Tea Party move that at first seems consistent with its antigovernment philosophy but is really about abusing a government program with weak oversight. In August 2011, a Tea Party freshman, Representative Austin Scott of Georgia, president of the Republican freshman class, introduced a bill to abolish the Legal Services Corporation. He said that poor people didn’t need government-funded attorneys because they could find representation elsewhere. He said he was just trying to save the taxpayers money. The bill was introduced three days after Legal Services lawyers won a decision from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Hamilton Growers, a company in Scott’s district, had illegally discriminated against its U.S. workers in favor of Mexican migrant workers. The discrimination included deliberately giving the U.S. workers less favorable assignments and fewer work hours and engaging in a pattern of firing U.S. workers in order to hire more guest workers from Mexico, under a visa program that allows employers to hire them when they anticipate a shortage of American workers. The program was not set up to provide a way for employers to dismiss or refuse to hire American workers so that they can hire foreign workers at substandard wages with no benefits. The real purpose of the first bill Representative Scott sponsored was to punish Legal Services lawyers for exposing these abuses of the visa program by an employer in his district.
Ironically, in his successful 2010 campaign against a moderate Democratic incumbent, Scott promised to be tough on illegal foreign workers taking precious U.S. jobs. Though in this incident the foreign workers were technically here legally, it is still hard to see how kicking American citizens out of jobs to hire temporary immigrants is a good thing. As the Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank says, the Tea Party may have started as a populist revolt, “but it has been hijacked by plutocrats.”3
When the Tea Party first emerged, I admired its founders’ principles even when I disagreed with their policies. The early organizers were protesting a government that bailed out banks