silveradept | Shadow Idol, Prompt 3

I see the 99% every day. I know some of them by name. How are you today, Mr. Jones? Mrs. Gonzalez?

Others I know by habit - you're the one that spends three hours on our job search computers, looking for anything that a person who's skills are now twenty years out of date, you're the one who just graduated and is desperately trying to find someone willing to hire someone out of high school. You come to get out of the house and meet others with little ones, because day care is too expensive. You're here because the shelters turn out everyone at dawn and we're one of the few places you can go and stay the day and nobody will kick you out or threaten to have you arrested for loitering. You? We're one of the few places that tries to work with your illness and just wants to make sure that the peace isn't disturbed too much if you have an attack while you're here.

You come in because you can't afford your broadband access and if it weren't for your cell phone you would have no way of anyone to reach you. You come in because you can't afford to buy anything that you would like to read, much less burn money on things that might be complete crap. You're here because there's nowhere to go after school but here because you can't go home - the door's locked, both parents work, and you don't have a key.

I see all of you, and I feel empathy for your struggles, as we deal with our own. As the values of your houses shrink, our operating budget shrinks with it. As you deal with layoffs and unemployment insurance, we lament the loss of staff because our millage rate is already at its maximum, the budget must be balanced, and the biggest expense is people and their benefits. Our usage statistics skyrocket as more and more people join the ranks of the unemployed, whether short-term or long-term. Perversely, our revenues drop when we need them the most.

There are bright spots, of course - the child whose face lights up when they receive their library card, knowing that it means they can take out anything in the collection that they want, the kid who calls me his buddy to other adults because I told him he can check out as many books as he can carry and more, the teenager who finds one of our resources on the shelf and reads it bit by bit, never checking it out, but gaining from it all the same. The countless research projects I've been able to make a perfect resource appear in a rabbit-from-a-hat fashion, the magic of stories and songs passing on the importance of oral culture, even if all the words are printed now, and all the rest. Those bright spots are nourishing and help keep sanity when there are three separate meltdowns and two tantrums all happening in different places at the same time.

I see the 99% every day. I look at the elections and their results and I wonder whether we're going to be able to pass some extra revenue generation the next time we're projected to, because the polling here says that People Hate Taxes more than they realize what those taxes pay for. They only see it as an additional burden on their already stretched budgets. They can be both right and wrong about the issue at the same time.

And you know why they Hate Taxes? Strictly speaking, most of the 99% don't hate taxes. They hate that the tax code is unfair to them. Some conservative columnists throw around that "more than 50% of the people in the United States don't pay any taxes." That's misleading at best. They may pay no net income taxes, but they pay taxes, both on income and consumption. Sales taxes, FICA, Medicare, and the rest are still taken out of their entire paychecks, instead of a small percentage of their paychecks (After all, FICA tax stops at a little over $110,000 of gross dollar earnings) The 1% don't want to pay taxes, even though they're the people who can do so without their lives being unduly affected. They would much prefer to charge taxes and profit from the costs of being poor. Your bank, for example, will probably run debits first before any credits to your account. If you happen to get overdrawn in those debits, then your bank will charge you a tax each time they can. The credit card comopanies are more than happy to tax you any way they find they can, whether for the privilege of having the card, or for any of the gracious pittances of rewards programs they offer, and all of these taxes are on top of the legalized usury they perform. (And then there are the payday lenders, whose legalized usury and poor taxation is even more.)

How much in net taxes do some of the most profitable companies pay? Zero or less. Yes, they do pay things like employer contributions to FICA and the like, but as their profits grow, the percentage of taxes they pay gets less...or they get it all back, like the columnists are saying is such a bad thing if the 99% do it. Those billions and billions are offset through the tax code. That offends the sensibilities of people interested in fairness. So when they Hate Taxes, it's because they know they'll be paying those taxes, and the corporations won't be.

In a functioning representative democracy, the elected representatives would be working to ensure that this is not the case. But there's one other thing that the 1% has working in their favor: Time. With having lots of money, one also has time. Many of the 1% work one job or less. Many of the 99% are working two or more, when they can get work. That doesn't give them any time to assert themselves and organize. Instead, they get inculcated with the message of the 1%. Because the 1% has the television stations, and the newspapers, and the cable companies that pick and choose what message goes out and how things are spun. And the money to fund campaigns that use all of those media to get messages out, so by extension, they also own the politicians that run. And most of the politicians are part of the 1%, anyway - they'll spend millions of their own money to get the power of government.

So they'll wait out the siege, and send the police after the demonstrators for anything they can.

The whole situation still stinks, despite it having been in place for as long as some of us have been here on Terra.

Which is why we talk about it in this week's prompt - "coprolite". Fossilized dung. That happens to have relevance to modern life.