Nell Abernathy and Steph Sterling

Opinion contributors

The tax plan that Republican congressional leaders hope to pass this week and send to President Trump will soon be regarded as the zenith in a story nearly 40 years in the making, where corporations and a handful of America’s wealthiest families — some of whom now hold positions in the government directly — leverage their outsized economic power into political power. It is what happens when corporate and political power become inseparable. It is a call to arms to dismantle not just the plan itself, but the structural conditions that wrought it.

The compromise House-Senate plan, like the separate bills each chamber passed earlier, so lacks a clear policy or economic justification that it can only be explained as pure pander to Republican donor interests. Though have some tried to marshal policy arguments in favor, each fails on its merits.

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Economists and CEOs on both the left and right have been clear that the massive corporate tax cuts will not create jobs. The Tax Policy Center, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and every other credible analysis has indicated only a small share of the corporate windfall will reach workers. Even CEOs themselves admitted they would not use the money to invest. And the most damning evidence that the GOP's purpose is to appease donor interests came from senators themselves, who admitted their financial contributions would dry up if they didn't pass a tax package.

Like the multinational corporations that demanded it, the Republican tax bill is extractive, taking money from middle-class Americans in order to finance tax cuts for the rich. In much the same way that corporate executives leverage their power to outsource jobs, borrow money, close plants, and squeeze supply chains in order to provide pay-outs to the company’s wealthy shareholders, Republicans have leveraged their power to raise taxes on workers, cut Medicare, borrow money from future generations, and outsource jobs in order to provide pay-outs to the corporate interests that are, in effect, congressional Republicans’ wealthy shareholders. When Senate Democrats offered an amendment to require corporations benefiting from the tax cut to raise wages at the same rate they reward shareholders and CEOs, every single Republican senator opposed it.

The process that led to its passage earlier this month also evinced the raw exercise of those with power over those without. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dispensed with the usual Senate pretense of legitimacy, steam-rolling his Democratic colleagues. With mere hours of debate and parts of the bill written on the legal equivalent of the back of a napkin, the Senate ignored centuries of tradition and rushed the vote. When you are looting the Treasury, it’s smart to do it quickly and in secret.

As further evidence of the aggregation of corporate and political power that brought us to this point, Republicans are determined to pass this plan over the objections of the vast majority of voters. According to FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls just before the Dec. 2 Senate vote, less than a third of voters supported the tax bill and 46% opposed it. In a new Quinnipiac poll asking voters about "the Republican tax plan," 55% were opposed and only 26% were in favor.

The economic paradigm of the last several decades may not have started as an effort to turn our policies and politics over to the richest Americans and largest corporations. But that is a natural consequence of the paradigm's failure to recognize the ways power works in our economy.

In free market thinking, large firms are just as subject to competition as small firms. Workers can negotiate just as well as their bosses. White people are as likely to lose jobs in recessions as people of color. Free market economists and politicians, enabled by the few that would benefit, pursued almost 40 years of policies and flawed arguments that allowed the rich and corporations to dominate markets and take home a larger and larger share of profits.

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Today, the economic winners no longer need an ideology to win in politics. Shielded by their own power, they can simply write the rules — nonsensical as they are — to shore up their own wealth and power. We are in a self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating cycle, where political and economic power are inseparable.

The American people should stop this bill from becoming law — or, if that fails, at every turn challenge and question those who voted for it. But that is not enough to reverse the trend. The majority of people who oppose this bill and the orthodoxy that led to it must now demand a new economic agenda designed to reallocate power. This could start with a sweeping new ethics act reigning in the ways corporations influence government, as well as a new anti-trust act for the 21st century that cracks down on anti-competitive corporate power that keeps the cycle going.

It also means policy leaders need to start affirmatively calling for higher taxes on corporations and the super-rich and their heirs — not because it’s the fair thing to do, but because it’s one of the most effective ways to rein in corporate power and take our own power back.

Nell Abernathy is the vice president of policy and research at the Roosevelt Institute. Steph Sterling is the institute's vice president of advocacy. Follow them on Twitter: @NellAbernathy and @stephlovessoup