Portside

Gas prices are down nearly 35 cents from last year, yet this has had virtually no impact on this year’s first quarter profits of the big oil companies.

That $9.2 billion tax bill that Apple dodged in cooking up a scheme this week to finance a $55 billion stock buyback for its shareholders would have been enough to make unnecessary all of the major budget cuts in the sequester. That's not counting the tax dodges of Bank of America, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, FedEx, General Electric, Honeywell, Merck, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Verizon.

Media darling Rand Paul is doing his best to end progressive taxation in America. Randolph Paul, over a half-century ago, helped make progressive taxation a prime building block for America’s middle class golden age. To stop politicos like Rand, we need to remember insightful advocates like Randolph.

As the medical device tax saga shows, cutting loopholes is really hard to do in practice. They were likely put there to benefit specific industries, which can often be quite powerful and influence even stalwart liberal Senators who claim to want new revenue sources. Many progressives thus fear that the loopholes most likely to be closed are the ones that benefit people without lobbyists—middle-class wage earners and homeowners, students, and the very poor.

These regional disparities go back to Reconstruction, when Southern Republicans increased property taxes on defeated white landowners and former slaveholders to pay for the first public services — education, hospitals, roads — ever provided to black citizens. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, conservative Democrats — popularly labeled “the Redeemers” — rolled taxes back to their prewar levels and inserted supermajority clauses into state constitutions.