People Don’t Abuse the System, but Companies Absolutely Do

How billion dollar corporations have exploited federal aid for decades to avoid paying decent wages

Credits: Unsplash

In 1980, Ronald Reagan pledged to rid the country of “welfare queens” by reducing the federal safety net, which he argued made people lazy. Then, once he took office, Reagan drastically curtailed federal social safety spending, while simultaneously procuring a massive tax cut to large corporations and individuals in the top tax bracket. Despite his assertions that he would balance the budget, the annual federal spending deficit nearly tripled. After the top tax brackets for corporations were knocked from 48 to 35 percent and individual federal income tax rates were dropped from 70 to 28 percent, no politician has successfully been able to raise them back to sustainable levels without erroneously being labelled a socialist. In this sense, we never left the Reagan era, and our current tax code is perhaps the most enduring staple of his legacy.

Four decades ago, the motto “Greed is good” was born, and ever since then, the United States has seen a deterioration of unions and decline in middle class salaries. Nowadays, most large, publicly traded companies typically provide the lowest possible wages that are regulated by the government. Since the current minimum wage is so low that realistically no person can sustain a…