How to Unf*ck America: Part 7 — Taxes

By Rob C.

Art by Pat Bagley

TL;DR: America doesn’t have a tax problem — it has a billionaire tax-evasion industrial complex. The working class pays, the rich hide their money offshore, Republicans attacks the IRS on purpose, and they all pretend the nation “can’t afford” healthcare or functioning bridges. We once taxed the rich at 95% and corporations funded most of the federal government — and guess what? We created the biggest middle class in human history. Time to bring that energy back.

How to Unf*ck America: Tax the Rich

(Or: How the Poor Keep the Lights On While the Rich Sail Their Yachts to the Caymans)

Let’s talk taxes — the adult version of a horror movie where the scariest thing is your W-2.

If you’re a normal human being, taxes are the thing that make you mutter, “I’m being robbed” while punching numbers into TurboTax like you’re defusing a bomb. Meanwhile, if you’re a billionaire, taxes are… optional. A suggestion. A fair tax system for average Americans, you know, the ones without a legal team, an offshore shell company in the Caymans, and a yacht conveniently named ‘Write-Off.’”

Welcome to America, where the working class pays taxes and the rich pay accountants.

A Brief History of Taxes (aka: How We Got Screwed)

In the early part of the 20th century, we actually had a sane idea: tax people with lots of money. Wild concept, I know.

FDR — a “socialist” by today’s Fox News standards and a “common sense leader” by historical standards — who implemented a democratic economy. In my own book, I talk about the difference between socialism vs. capitalism and how democracy depends on investment in the country and it’s people, you know “socialism”. Capitalism should be treated like fire: useful in a fireplace, catastrophic when it’s burning down the house.

From the 1930s through the 1970s, America used taxes to do something truly shocking: Build a functioning society.
• Top tax rate? Up to 95%.
• Corporate taxes? 60% of federal revenue.
• Outcomes? The largest middle class in human history.

It turns out you can build highways, send soldiers to college, and land people on the moon when billionaires are forced to chip in for the civilization that makes them billionaires in the first place.

But then… the National Association of Manufacturers and a rogues’ gallery of corporate libertarians launched an ideological carpet-bombing campaign — see The Big Myth — convincing regular people that “taxation is theft” but “corporate subsidies are patriotism.”

A+ marketing. F- economics.

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The Great American Shell Game: How the Rich Stopped Paying Taxes Entirely

Let’s review the evidence we all already know:
• The Panama Papers revealed a global cathedral of offshore tax shelters.
• The U.S. loses $500 billion every single year to billionaire and corporate tax evasion — enough to wipe out the deficit.
• The IRS has spent decades defunded, demonized, and legally kneecapped by Republicans (with generous help from corporate Democrats who whisper “don’t look in my donors’ bank accounts”).
• The biggest corporations — Amazon, Chevron, Netflix, FedEx, the whole Monopoly board — routinely pay 0% taxes or get refunds.

Imagine a system where the poorest person you know pays more in taxes than Jeff Bezos.
Congratulations: you live in it.

“But the Stock Market Is Booming!” — Yes, For Them

And of course, the same cast of “economic thinkers” who insist we can’t possibly tax the rich also tell us the stock market is the economy.

As I’ve written before, that’s nonsense. That’s like saying the scoreboard is the game.
Most Americans don’t own individual stocks.
Corporations pump their share prices through buybacks, not productivity.
And the “shareholder economy” is a casino that only pays out to the house.

But hey — as long as the Dow is happy, working people can eat vibes.

Republicans vs. the IRS: A Love Story

Republicans hate the IRS with a passion— not because it’s bad for America, but because it might someday inconvenience their donors.

Defunding the IRS is the GOP’s version of slashing the tires on the only cop car in town right before robbing the bank.

Every dollar invested in IRS enforcement brings in up to $12 in recovered taxes. That’s a better return than the stock market, Vegas, or Trump University. Which is precisely why powerful people hate it.

What We Could Have If Billionaires Paid Taxes

If the richest Americans paid anything close to what they owe, we could:
• Fully fund every public school in the country
• Provide universal healthcare
• Pay for housing for every veteran
• Rebuild infrastructure
• Provide affordable childcare

• Lower taxes on the working class

So here’s a wild idea: stop pretending America is “broke”.

We’re not broke.
We’re being robbed.

We Don’t Live in a “Free Market” — We Live in a Rigged One

In my book, I lay out the actual differences between capitalism, socialism, and communism — none of which resemble the cartoon versions pushed by Fox News or Silicon Valley libertarians. An actual democracy requires shared investment where everyone pays into the pot. And real freedom requires a system that eliminates the fear of going bankrupt because you got sick.

What we have instead is a winner-take-all economy where 0.1% of the country wins, and the rest of us are told to work harder.

We Can Fix This

Here’s how we start unf*cking the tax system:

• Stop subsidizing massively profitable corporations

• Close offshore loopholes and tax havens

• Limit how much “investment” can be written off

• Fund the IRS to actually audit the people who matter

• Bring back a truly progressive tax structure

• Make corporations pay what they used to pay

• Protect workers, not wealth hoarders

Because here’s the truth:
A nation where the rich pay nothing and the poor pay everything is not a democracy — it’s an empire where the citizens are the colony.

We fixed this once before.
We can fix it again.
And this time, we don’t need to build the largest middle class in world history from scratch.
We just need to stop letting billionaires demolish what’s left of it.

Please help balance the budget and smash that ❤️button, follow and subscribe so we can afford our democracy.

Robert Cain, is author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet