(Source: William Domhoff)

Corporations are people, too, and a new report by ThinkProgress illustrates just how people-oriented 12 Republican-dominated states are. It's true that somebody will have to pay for this orientation. But from the perspective of governors such as Chris Christie, Rick Snyder, Terry Branstad and Tom Corbett, those somebodies have been leeching off the taxpayers for too long. And they, and like-minded governors and state legislatures are determined to do something about it by cutting corporate taxes, laying off public employees and slashing services. Their idea of shared sacrifice is for American workers to sacrifice and the wealthy to share the spoils.

The ideology behind this is nothing new. The ability to make it stick is. And if the targets of these class-war attacks engage in self defense? Plead union intimidation and call the cops. A couple of examples from the report:



IOWA: Gov. Tom Terry Branstad (R) began this year proposing a budget that included a $200 million tax cut on commercial property taxes and corporate income but would freeze spending on schools, cut $42 million to state universities and lay off “hundreds” of state workers. Since then, the Governor has already begun laying off state nursing home workers and frozen funding for mental health services. The budget is now moving through the politically divided legislature, where Republican-controlled House committees have gone even further, approving tax refunds for upper-income Iowans while cancelling infrastructure investments, eliminating preschool for 4-year-olds, closing Iowa workforce development offices, and making even deeper cuts to public universities. ... SOUTH CAROLINA: Gov. Nikki Haley (R) has proposed ending the state’s corporate income tax, even while she calls for cutting physical education, K-12 schools, and Medicaid. Haley has received pushback from Republican colleagues: last week the legislature rejected her plan to force state employees to pay more for health insurance.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1 is on the table to do even more damage to rank-and-file Americans. This double-barreled assault gears up without any change in the wage stagnation that has afflicted U.S. workers for all but a handful of the past 30 years. This despite large gains in productivity:

Why did the richest 1% of Americans receive 56% of all the income growth between 1989 and 2007, before the recession began (compared with 16% going to the bottom 90% of households)? Why are corporate profits 22% above their pre-recession level while total corporate sector employees’ compensation (reflecting lower employment and meager pay increases) is 3% below pre-recession levels?

Why? As Josh Bivens says, By design. "The good news is that the policy does what it is designed to do. The bad news is that we designed it to funnel lots of money to the very rich." Of course, "we" didn't design it. We let it happen. And the current crew of designers are determined to make the funnel bigger because their expectation is that we will keep letting it happen.