By Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County

Will Republicans running for Congress this year campaign on the gigantic $1.5 trillion tax cut package passed last year? In truth, those cuts weren’t made for the base. They were made for the benefit of the donor class which demanded them. The paltry tax breaks that go to regular people fade out after a few years.

Only $6 billion has been given out in bonuses to employees, supposedly as a result of the tax cut. In contrast, $170 billion has already been spent on stock buybacks. Those are projected to reach $800 billion this year, which would set a new annual record by far. That is how the tax savings are really being used, and considering that 80 percent of stocks are owned by 10 percent of Americans, the tax cut promises to make our unhealthy economic inequality even worse.

Those who point out this inequality, which is bordering on obscene, are sometimes accused of envy. At a GOP gubernatorial forum in Rochester last fall, Jeff Johnson made a special point to defend our rigged system this way.

Meanwhile, since Republicans control everything, warnings of deficits are no longer a constant drumbeat from conservative circles. The last time that happened was during the George W. Bush administration. In 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney told Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who was apprehensive about another round of tax cuts, “You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.”

We haven’t recovered yet from the damage that Bush and Cheney’s tax cuts, home mortgage crisis and unpaid wars of choice added to our national debt, and now we’re inching toward trillion dollar deficits again. A $1.5 trillion tax cut is insane when the economy is already humming, unless the true goal is to force cuts in budget giants Social Security and Medicare. Many people rely on them, some exclusively. One-third of Americans age 55 and over have no retirement savings.

To recap, the huge tax cuts benefit mainly rich people, and the deficits they create will likely result in service reductions for the rest of us.

Voters aren’t crazy about this. Republicans, especially Donald Trump, are instead stoking fear of violent crime (which has decreased to levels from the 1970s, and the murder rate is down to 1960s rates) and fear of immigrant crime (though immigrants have a lower crime rate than citizens). MS-13, Trump’s recent go-to bogeyman, only represents about 1 percent of active gang members nationally. The name of the game is manipulation — fear colors perception.

Here is a crime fact that hardly enters public awareness: money laundering activities in the U.S. are conservatively estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars every year. It’s tax evasion in progress, and it’s prosecuted less than 1 percent of the time. In contrast, bank robberies amounted to a comparatively tiny $17 million in heists in 2016, and more than 50 percent of the perpetrators were caught.

Republicans’ response to this crime wave? Calling for more cuts to the IRS, the agency which enforces tax laws. The agency’s enforcement staff has already shriveled by 23 percent since 2010, and Trump has proposed further cuts. Shouldn’t the rule of law apply to the biggest thieves too?

The Republican mantra of taxes being bad and government being wasteful has become absurd. Here’s what is most ironic to me — the top 10 list of states that rely most on government employment in their workforce includes seven of the 10 deepest red states in the country. Wyoming is No. 1.

The higher percentage is partly because they’re rural, and services can’t be administered as efficiently when populations are more dispersed. Few will admit it, but rural areas are naturally more dependent on government for capital investments and services. Rural areas are also sources of commodities, including food and raw materials, and the finished products that come back are more expensive. Third, rural areas provide a net gain for the urban workforce because many kids who are raised in the country move to the city to find jobs with higher salaries and wages.

The cream of the rural crop disproportionately enriches urban areas.

“Redistribution” is, thus, not a bad word. Without government sending resources back to rural counties and communities in the form of local government aid and county aid, etc., rural areas would be at an even bigger disadvantage.

People in Freeborn County should insist on better government, not less government. Less government lets resources flow to the top unhindered, where it accumulates in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals, mainly in large cities.

Americans used to hold the common good in higher esteem. That has changed to our detriment, especially in rural areas. We do our part, and we should demand a fair deal in return, not kowtow to the selfish desires of wealthy donors.