Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on billionaires, millionaires, and corporations, enact a windfall tax on oil corporations, lower drug prices, pass paid sick leave and child care legislation, and pass the Save Oak Flat Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.
Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax on billionaires, while Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a surtax on millionaires and raise corporate taxes. Billionaires made about $2 trillion during this pandemic while we struggled to make ends meet, and a wealth tax (of roughly 2% on wealth over $1 billion) would raise a lot of money. A millionaire surtax would essentially raise the top tax rates on millionaire income by five to eight percentage points, which wouldn't be the 91% rate I want to bring back, but which would do a lot of good. And, of course, we need to tell the 50 Republicans plus Kyrsten Sinema they're wrong about corporate taxes every chance we get. So let's get back to it.
Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act. I didn't know the other day that the bill -- in addition to taxing big oil profits whenever they decide to use inflation or Ukraine (or whatever!) as a cover for hiking the price of gas -- would remit the money it collects from big oil corporations back to working families making less than $150,000 (or, if only one parent works, $112,500), which should help the folks hardest hit by price hikes endure them a little better. Now let's see how many Republicans decide to go on record as voting against taxing big oil corporations and rebating that money back to good Americans. West Virginians, please clog Joe Manchin's phone lines; I don't want him giving those Republicans any more cover.
Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to, well, lower drug prices for all Americans. The news hook this time? Sen. Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told Politico that "if we want to reduce drug prices, then we need to do it now," because of "the difficulty of passing something like this in a Republican Congress." In other words, if Republicans win back our House and Senate, they simply won't do it; that's a hell of an admission from the man who'd be Senate Pro Tempore again if Republicans take back the Senate, and it allows his 2022 opponents a campaign angle: if you want to reduce drug prices, replace Charles Grassley with me. Anyway, we already know that Congress won't do a damn thing unless we make it impossible for them not to do it, and that starts with communicating your will to your Reps and Senators until they get it.
Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund paid family/sick leave. Yes, 50 Republicans and Joe Manchin don't want it, but they're wrong there, too -- why, even a lot of CEOs will tell them that paid sick leave at least gives them some certainty as they deal with employee absenteeism. And the United States is virtually alone in the world in not providing some sort of paid sick leave to working families. Sen. Gillibrand's bills all funded paid sick leave with a tiny payroll tax, amounting to about $8 every month for workers making $50,000 annually; I'd prefer to tax the rich for that as well -- I mean, really, when is Jeff Bezos going to spend $180 billion? You can only go to the edge of space so many times with so many Star Trek actors before it gets old! -- but that should demonstrate how easy it'd be to fund it.
Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass child care legislation much like Senator Murray proposed in recent legislation and President Biden included in the Build Back Better Act. Basically, it would subsidize child care so that working families pay no more than 7% of their income in child care, and that's become a big expense for folks anymore, and you know why? Same reason college and health care have become such a big expense for folks anymore: they can't do without it. This ain't a "free" market at work, this is a captive market at work, and our government has to step in anywhere a captive market develops. What can right-wingers say in response? Don't have kids? Be happy you have jobs? I kid, of course -- right-wingers can't say anything about that, which is why they yammer on so much about critical race theory.
Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1884/S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. You recall former Arizona Sens. Flake and McCain delivering the Oak Flat region of the Tonto National Forest to the big mining corporation for whom Sen. Flake used to work as a lobbyist? The Save Oak Flat Act would reverse that giveaway, and never lease that land to any mining or fossil fuel corporation again, thus protecting Oak Flat from both pollution and desecration, since Oak Flat is also sacred land to the Apache. Sadly, neither of the Democrats who have replaced Messrs. Flake and McCain (Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly) have joined as co-sponsors of the bill. Arizona residents might as well call them both, though I doubt Ms. Sinema will do anything but laugh at them.
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