How Trump’s OBBB Transfers Wealth from Working Families to Corporations, And What It Means for Placer County Taxpayers

-Special to the PlacerDems Blog by William Forseth, former Editor-in-Chief with the American River Current and Roseville resident

I’d like to set up a couple scenarios for you. Perhaps you’ve seen them in your past to some degree. During the Super Bowl, you bet and won BIG online. $100k in winnings because you took a big chance and got a big win!

Later in the year, you’ve gone to Thunder Valley with some friends. Maybe you’ve had a few too many, or maybe you were on a heater, but the end result was giving that $100k back to another Casino.

You’ve broken even, right? No harm, no foul? According to the new federal budget, you will still be taxed on those winnings despite then losing an equal amount. In the case of that $100,000 you won then lost, 10% or that, or $10,000, will be taxed by the federal government.

This is the most recent attempt to balance the federal budget, you can expect that every little expense that used to be covered, like Medicare, will now have to come from your pocket or your deductible. 

The new budget is going to leave the country feeling like we’re flying Spirit Airlines. Your taxes will be lower, but your costs for things like medical care, food and education will be going up.

Sure, less of your federal tax dollars will go to healthcare, but your healthcare costs will grow as hospitals will need to use your medical payments to cover the uncompensated healthcare costs that would’ve been prevented through Covered CA.

Sure, the undocumented immigrants will no longer be in your country, but your food costs will go up as farmers’ labor costs skyrocket.

Sure, those farmers will take a hit as tariffs restrict that amount of U.S. produced food sold around the world, but record high farm subsidies paid out using your tax dollars will compensate for that.

This isn’t anything new, since corporations have been doing something similar in the recent past. Rates for goods and services are kept low early in the life of a new company, with the goal of driving up the number of regular users and eliminating the competition. Then like UBER in 2018, customer cost is transitioned to a profit model, leaving customers and drivers alike to accept low wages and high costs.

“If the goal is to have the government run like a business, then you can anticipate your tax dollars being transitioned to a profit model, leaving tax payers and government institutions like Medicare holding the bag for the upcoming rate hike.”

If the goal is to have the government run like a business, then you can anticipate your tax dollars being transitioned to a profit model, leaving tax payers and government institutions like Medicare holding the bag for the upcoming rate hike.

If this still hasn’t convinced you as to the goal of wealth transfer by the Trump administration, then there’s plenty of other examples of that administration finding ways of siphoning income from hard working Americans. Rather than having stablecoins (or government backed cryptocurrency) controlled by the government, as is the case with the dollars, the GENIUS Act allows for individual companies to create their own cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency in the form of stablecoin will be yet another avenue from which your hard earned wealth will be transferred to corporations. Their capability to avoid taxation will become significantly easier once they are able to transfer digital wealth, under lightly regulated conditions, into cash and vice versa while being overseen by a federal government complicit in the theft.

Anyone with any recollection of the 2008 financial crisis can see why this will be an issue. Considering how poorly the federal government has done to regulate financial institutions in the past, it stands to reason that the regulation of stablecoin issued by individual parties like corporations will be executed with the same rampant corruption we’ve seen time and time again.

Further, corporate stablecoins will become a digital version of scrip, the exclusionary currency used by coal mining companies in the Dakota territory to keep their workers tied to the company store and working on the mines.

When we say freedom isn’t free, we’re usually talking about the brave men and women in the armed services. We could also count the regulators, whistleblowers, and inspectors general tasked with preserving those freedoms through transparency. Considering most of those positions have been DOGEd out of existence, it’s easy to see how the Trump administration, Kevin Kiley and Joe Patterson are setting themselves up to transfer your wealth to the blockchain wallets of those that got them into power.

-Special to the PlacerDems Blog by William Forseth, former Editor-in-Chief with the American River Current and Roseville resident.