ArcaMax

"I've got those

Payday-Friday

Grocery store blues."

That working-class lament is from an old bluegrass song, but millions of working stiffs are singing it today. While many workers have finally seen an uptick in their paychecks, they've been dismayed to see the increase quickly gobbled up by jacked-up grocery prices. What the hell?

Kamala Harris has had the honesty to call it what it is: gouging. And, to put some bite in her bark, she's proposing a long-overdue national ban on rip-off pricing by food giants. Of course, this produced outraged squeals by corporate functionaries. But some of the most furious squealing is coming from a supposedly unbiased corner of America's economic structure: economists.

A little-known secret of this occult profession is that most economists are schooled by and working for the corporate order, generally hostile to consumers, workers and other competing interests. One absolute rule they learn is that none of the inequities and iniquities of America's laissez-fairyland economy are to be blamed on corporate greed.

Thus, a whole pack of mainline economists raced to poo-pooh Harris' price-gouging charge, asserting that grocery prices have naturally surged due to what they benignly call "price pack architecture."

Bovine excrement! Price gouging cannot be perfumed by semantics -- it is mass swindling, and people can detect it by its stench. So, let's follow that stench to its anti-free enterprise source: monopoly. For the past half-century, economists in both Republican and Democratic administrations have looked the other way, allowing food giants to consolidate and conglomerate, shut out competitors, monopolize every aspect of the food economy -- and steal.

It's that theft that Harris is daring to challenge, and Americans will cheer her on -- no matter how furiously establishment economists squeal.

THE RIGHT-WING ATTACK ON SOCIAL SECURITY IS UN-AMERICAN

Right-wing ideologues are mounting a three-pronged fraud trying to delegitimize Social Security, slash its benefits, and then -- zzzzzt! -- kill it.

First, they tried to demonize our public retirement program as a socialist horror. That hasn't worked, since this pension literally works, allowing millions of workaday American families to escape old-age poverty.

So, in Lie No. 2, they shriek: "Social Security is bankrupt -- you future retirees will be left penniless in old age!" Uh ... no. The bulk of retiree benefits are covered by payroll taxes, which continue to flow in, so the program is in no danger at all of folding.

Well, they exclaim in Lie No. 3, even to keep the program on life support requires gutting it by raising people's retirement age to 70 or older and slashing monthly payments to retirees.

Uh ... gosh, no again. Such a gut job would be immoral -- half of America's workers get no retirement benefits except Social Security. Plus, such callousness is totally unnecessary, because there's an obvious, easy and fair fix: Apply the Social Security tax to everyone!

While working stiffs pay this tax on every dollar they earn, millionaires and billionaires are taxed only on the first $170,000 of their astronomical pay. Take Elon Musk, the richest man in America, who claimed a $45 billion paycheck last year. But under current law, he only pays Social Security taxes on $170,000 of that -- meaning $44,999,830,000 of his income goes untaxed. Why shouldn't he pay like everyone else?

Tax everyone equally -- the rich as well as the working class -- so everyone can have a secure, dignified retirement. That's what the American concept of the common good means.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

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