Column: Jennifer Vogt-Erickson,  My Point of View

The Reagan legacy has been an ongoing 30-year financial drain for most families.

Despite all the conservative idol worship surrounding him, Ronald Reagan took a big chunk of change out of most people’s paychecks. (If you’re wealthy, this does not apply to you. Keep right on venerating the Gipper as the daddy of all tax cutters. Cheers!) If you’re in the working or middle classes making less than the $106,000 cap in salary or wages per year, you took it on the shins. That’s because his policies gradually raised the Social Security tax rate from 9.35 percent in 1981 to 15.3 percent in 1990.

Theoretically, if you’re a working stiff, you should get all that tax money back someday, but in the meantime the government is using the money to fund present-day programs. It’s a neat trick, even more so if the retirement age is raised.

I’m not against paying taxes, but I want wealthy people to pay their fair share, too. The U.S. now has one of the biggest wealth gaps in the industrialized world. Did the people on the bottom get lazier while the people on the top got incredibly more industrious? Hardly. Our taxation system for the past 30 years has been a mechanism for siphoning money from the bottom to the top.

Members of the Tea Party toss around the term “freeloaders” a lot. Lately it’s been applied to public workers in Wisconsin who tried to defend their collective bargaining rights.

Here’s my definition of freeloaders: People who make millions or even billions of dollars off the amazing material and human resources of our country and its democratic institutions and then try to convince voters that 35 percent is an exorbitant level for the highest income tax bracket. I hear a giant sucking sound, and it’s not coming from Mexico.

We need to make sacrifices in these times, but some people can make substantially bigger ones. A tax increase for a wealthy person might mean one less luxury automobile or yacht, while a cut in public services could mean the loss of a decent job for a wage earner. It’s obvious which family takes the hardest hit. Working Americans, including Tea Partiers, should help people on planet Plutocrat keep things in perspective, not protect their bubble.

I reserve a special freeloader status, though, for Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs. Its employees took home multi-million dollar bonuses while extracting fantastical sums from the housing bubble and then forced U.S. taxpayers to come to its rescue when it popped. One year after its bailout, Goldman had record-breaking profits. Not bad for making titanically bad short-term decisions, erasing jobs, eviscerating pension funds and wrecking many average people’s credit for years.

Here’s a quick quiz: A year after the bubble burst, what did the CEO of Goldman Sachs receive?

A. a prison sentence

B. a $9 million bonus

The correct answer is B. Incidentally, no one has been prosecuted for actions that precipitated the financial meltdown. It’s back to business as usual, and the gains are not trickling down.

This is a democracy, though, and the Securities and Exchange Commission was designed to prevent abuses like this before Wall Street hijacked its rules. The situation is fixable with political courage and will. The tax code can be made more progressive again too. It’s time to close the curtain on the Gipper’s new Gilded Age and bring morning back to average Americans.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.