Average Rhode Islanders paying
for tax cuts for wealthy

As you listen to radio in Rhode Island remind yourself of the proverb “beware the wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

The Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce is running radio ads in most local media markets aimed at scaring working Rhode Islanders into thinking any attempt to get the rich to pay their fair of taxes will bring about an economic “death spiral” for our state.

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The gist of the spot is aimed at getting folks who work for a living to identify with the people who run major multinational corporations. You know who they are, those poor, under-appreciated multi-millionaire CEOs who are trying to make an honest buck. The ones who have profited from 10 years of successive tax cuts targeted specifically at them. These are the people who benefited directly, at a cost of more than $100 million to those not like them, from the cutting of the capital gains tax and the establishment of the so-called flat tax.

It is important to try and understand the true motivation of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce. From my perspective, it has nothing to do with keeping jobs in Rhode Island or protecting good-paying jobs – except of course their own.

The Chamber of Commerce is hardly the voice of the neighborhood “mom and pop” store it likes to claim to be. A quick perusal of its Web site shows that their board of directors is chock full of the major corporations with a presence in our state: Nortek, UnitedHealthcare of New England, Bank of America, Gilbane, National Grid, Cox Communications, Verizon, Amica and CVS Caremark.

Chamber Chairperson Ed Cooney has a personal stake in protecting the ill-begotten tax gains for the rich: according to Nortek company documents, Cooney raked in a compensation package worth $620,000 in 2006, plus an additional $413,576 in vested stock, plus a one-time payment of $738,477 in deferred compensation. And in case you don’t think getting paid almost $1.8 million is enough, Nortek paid for his income tax preparation.

On the national level the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spends more than any other organization to lobby political leaders, $53 million in 2007 alone. And 82 percent of the PAC donations went to Republicans. They, along with the rabidly anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform, were the key proponents of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

Back home in Rhode Island the Chamber is hardly a bit player in the Statehouse. Between the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2007, the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce has given $68,885 to members of the General Assembly and other candidates. How many small businesses, the ones struggling to make ends meet just like the people who work for them, know the Chamber is spending lavishly to protect million-dollar salaries of the big wigs who sit on its board?

The radio campaign sponsored by the Chamber encourages the lie that Rhode Islanders are fleeing the state because of our taxes. There is no evidence for this, and in fact the really interesting thing is that, despite the rhetoric, Rhode Island attracted upper-income people into the state while lower-income people left. According to multiple sources, including the Census Bureau and the Rhode Island Division of Planning, numbers show that for the period of time between 2001 and 2005, the state increased the number of people with higher incomes while people with working class and middle class incomes got squeezed.

So what did we do? We cut taxes for the people at the top of the economic strata and passed the bill onto the people down the bottom, all in an effort to … keep the rich from leaving. It is this kind of “corporations-first” thinking that has already produced the economic death spiral that many Rhode Islanders are experiencing as they work for less and less. •

Patrick Crowley is assistant executive director of NEA Rhode Island and chairperson of Rhode Island Jobs with Justice.