As the 2024 Democratic presidential primary campaign heats up, Marianne Williamson has emerged as a vocal challenger to President Joe Biden, and while not criticizing him directly the best-selling author has expressed disapproval of his limited efforts to address income inequality and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the wealthiest Americans.
In a Tax Day message to supporters, Williamson said President Biden’s incremental changes are simply not enough to address the deep-seated problems of inequality and injustice in our society.
“While most ordinary working Americans file their taxes this week worrying whether they will owe more than they can afford, the wealthiest among us continue to rest easy,” Williamson said. “Over the last five decades, there has been a transfer of $50 trillion from the bottom 90 percent in our country to the top 1 percent. This isn’t simply a byproduct of free market capitalism, it’s a soulless shakedown of America’s working class.”
“The narrative of just how badly we’re getting played is so prevalent in our consciousness, yet the political class has barely moved the needle when it comes to accountability,” said Williamson. “Individuals with immense personal resources, political clout, or a combination of both, continue to find ways to dodge paying their fair share in taxes.”
“Even worse, many get away with, through legal loopholes, paying nothing at all,” said Williamson. “The most recent expression of this was the $2 trillion dollar tax cut in 2017, where 83 percent of every dollar went to the richest corporations and citizens in our nation.”
Williamson said that while Biden has made some progress on issues such as healthcare and climate change, Americans need a more profound transformation of our economic system if we are to create a truly fair and just society.
“This massive theft of our public treasury merely continues a long-term trend of the maldistribution of wealth which is now worse than in 1929 on the eve of the Great Depression,” said Williamson. “While the wealthy avoid taxes, travel into space and enjoy their yachts, 40 percent of Americans can barely afford rent, food, healthcare and transportation costs. Thirty-seven million people live in poverty including eleven million children, while 103 million live in near poverty. Thirty-nine percent of Americans are skipping meals to make housing payments.
Williamson has proposed a set of bold policy initiatives that would significantly increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans, expand access to healthcare and education, and invest in green infrastructure to create new jobs and combat climate change.
“Our government has sacrificed their interests to what Franklin Delano Roosevelt termed ‘economic royalists’. The trillions of dollars that these economic royalists ransack from society by not paying taxes can be used to realize a new beginning for our nation,” said Williamson. “We can launch our country into the energy revolution with a Green New Deal. We can make sure every human being has access to affordable and quality healthcare. We can appropriately invest in future generations by making college free and eliminating all student debt.”
Williamson also pledged to create a national single-payer system that would guarantee access to healthcare for all Americans and eliminate private insurance, as well as to make college education free and eliminate student debt.
An analysis from the Tax Foundation said Biden’s tax proposals would reduce long-run economic output by about 0.21 percent in combination with
Williamson said Donald Trump and Barack Obama were considered a long shots when they got started, dismissing skeptics who say her presidential campaign is an uphill climb. Polls show three out of four Democrats do not want Biden to be the party’s nominee in 2024.
While complaints about inflation and the lackluster pace of Biden’s changes plague the incumbent’s re-election prospects, his challenger says that the major components of her plan have “been done before.”
“Many of Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms were initially ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but the court later reversed its decision and validated the key reforms,” said Williamson. “Throughout history, from FDR’S New Deal to LBJ’s Great Society, we invested in America, built the middle class, reduced poverty, and created Medicare and Medicaid. And we did it by making the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes and building the strength of our unionized workforce.”