A Fighting Chance

Now I was officially the Democrats’ choice and officially Scott Brown’s opponent. I knew the race was going to get even more intense over the next few months, but I understood that the endorsement I’d been given meant the people in this arena were ready to fight. I was ready, too.

During my speech, I had talked about Ted Kennedy, our party’s longtime champion in Massachusetts and in America. Later, riding home with Bruce and the kids, I thought about him again. I remembered the first time we’d met. I remembered his battered satchel, his enormous pride in Massachusetts as he looked out that twenty-fourth-floor window, his willingness to take on the long-odds fight for all the working families who were going broke. I leaned against the car’s window and thought about the election ahead and how I might have the chance to help working families, too. I couldn’t be Ted Kennedy, but at least I had a strong model for how to fight for what was right.

I pulled out my cell phone. I had saved a voice message from back when we were fighting for the consumer agency, and I’d listened to it off and on for years. It begins, “Oh, Elizabeth, uh, this is Ted Kennedy, just calling to thank you for your help.…” The message goes on, but I just wanted to hear the first part. I just wanted to hear his voice.





Getting Down to Business

As the summer went on, we still gathered in living rooms, but now we spilled into backyards and parks, cafés and bars.

Lots of bars, as a matter of fact.

Okay, that sounds like the start of a joke, but it’s not. Many times, in fact, I visited bars and insurance offices and all kinds of small businesses. Elizabeth Vale, who had helped us launch the CFPB, was now our champion for building business liaisons for the campaign. Over time, she hooked me up with tons of people who ran small businesses—restaurants and Internet start-ups, plumbers and home health care providers, florists and building contractors, landlords and dry cleaners. I met with fishermen in Gloucester, Scituate, and New Bedford to talk through the economics of their business. And yes, I met people who owned bars.

Some of these business owners were ready to support me. But others would say something like “I usually vote Republican because Republicans are pro-business.”

And I’d always get straight to the point: “Do you worry about how much you pay in taxes?”

“Sure.”

“So how much money do you have stashed in bank accounts in the Cayman Islands? How much intellectual property have you transferred to a foreign tax haven? How much of your income is shielded with depletion allowances?”

You can guess the response: None. None. None.

Then I would talk with these business owners about the ongoing battle over tax policy in America. A lot of it is couched in “big government vs. little government” or “pro-business vs. anti-business.” But I think most of that is a deliberate distraction so people don’t see the real battle. The critical question is: Who pays? Does everyone pay, or just the little guys?

For businesses, the real battle isn’t whether we need the government to invest in education and infrastructure and scientific research—businesses need all those investments. There’s nothing pro-business about crumbling roads and bridges or a power grid that can’t keep up. There’s nothing pro-business about cutting back on scientific research at a time when our businesses need innovation more than ever. There’s nothing pro-business about chopping education opportunities when workers need better training. To most people, it’s pretty obvious that businesses need government investments.

No, the real battle isn’t “pro-business vs. pro-government”; the real battle is whether everyone pays or just the little guys. Giant companies hire armies of lobbyists to craft custom-made tax loopholes. And it’s working: big corporations are paying an average tax of 12.6 percent of their profits, less than half of the advertised 35 percent corporate rate. Meanwhile, middle-class families and middle-size (and small) businesses are left to pick up the tab.

Over the course of that summer, I also talked with a lot of people who were self-employed. For so many of them, achieving any sort of financial security seemed to hover just out of reach. After completing a job, they often had to wait to collect what they were owed, but in the meantime, they had to meet their own expenses. They paid their own insurance, and they paid their income taxes straight up—no special tax loopholes for them. They weren’t asking for special breaks. They just wanted a level playing field.

That sure seemed right to me.





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