U.S. Government Loves Corporations - But Disdains Workers

The United States Congress absolutely loves corporations. They give them a dazzling array of subsidies to low the taxes they owe, and have created a variety of loopholes in the tax code to lower those taxes even more -- including giving them special tax breaks to ship American jobs to other countries, and allowing them to avoid taxes by keeping much of their profits in other countries. The result is that many corporations pay no taxes at all (even though they made many millions or billions in profit), and the rest pay only a tiny fraction of what they should be paying.

Does Congress extend that same kind of love to American workers? Not at all! Thanks to the actions of the last few Congresses, union strength has been diminished, worker wages are stagnant (and actually falling when inflation is considered), and the middle class is shrinking while more full time workers fall into poverty. The truth is that workers have very few rights in this country, and many in Congress (especially the Republicans) would like to erode those few rights even more.

The charts above make it clear how the U.S. government disdains American workers. They show the number of weeks of paid leave guaranteed to mothers in all the developed nations. Note that nearly all of those developed countries mandate some amount of paid leave for mothers (between 12 and 164 weeks of paid leave). There is only one nation that doesn't guarantee any paid leave at all for mothers -- the United States. A few companies in this country do give some paid leave to mothers -- but it is purely optional, and covers only about 12% of working mothers (which is 88% less mothers that receive paid leave than in all other developed nations).

But it is much worse than even that horrible statistic shows. The United States is the only developed nation that doesn't guarantee any paid annual leave for workers -- and it is the only developed nation that doesn't guarantee workers any paid sick leave at all. And it gets worse. Almost every other developed nation has a higher minimum wage (as a percentage of the median wage in that country) than the United States. And while many highly profitable corporations pay no income taxes at all, an American worker must live in poverty to not owe any income taxes.

It is obvious that the U.S. government has tilted the economic playing field to favor corporations (and the rich) to the detriment of workers -- thus exhibiting an almost complete lack of respect for American workers. This needs to change, or we will go further down the road to becoming a third world country -- a country people by only "haves" and "have-nots". Unfortunately, with the Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, that's very unlikely to happen in the next two years.