ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ

ST. LOUIS — Two lawsuits against the city of St. Louis tell a story about the redistribution of wealth.

The first, filed by attorneys Bevis Schock and Mark Milton, was settled earlier this month, with an agreement to refund city earnings taxes paid by people in the region who worked from home during the pandemic. The result will be to redistribute revenue that would have gone for trash collection and police and fire protection in the city to people who live in St. Louis County, St. Charles County and other counties.

Some folks in those places like to complain about crime in downtown St. Louis. They’ll be getting a refund from money intended to reduce downtown crime. Lawful? Probably. Just? A little less so.

The settlement spurred Mayor Tishaura O. Jones to convene a panel on future revenue possibilities for the city, as the 1% earnings tax comes under renewed attack.

The other lawsuit, filed last week and funded by the nonprofit Holy Joe Society — of which Schock is a member — targets a pilot program that is the brainchild of Jones. That program, part of a movement known as guaranteed basic income, is intended to distribute $500 monthly checks to poor people in St. Louis. The idea is to help reduce poverty by giving people direct cash payments to spend on whatever they want, from food to gas to child care expenses.

But that violates the Missouri Constitution, the lawsuit contends, which has a section that bans granting “public money or property to any private individual, association or corporation.�

The original writers of Missouri’s Constitution might be dismayed to find out that most of what government seems to exist for these days is to grant public money or property to private individuals and corporations.

That’s what happens every time a developer comes to a city, or a county or the state and asks for tax abatements, or tax credits or free land for their latest shiny thing. Missouri, for instance, is in at the moment, as the billionaire owners of the Kansas City Chiefs and Kansas City Royals pit the two states against each other to see which will hand over the most cash for new stadiums.

The owners of the St. Louis Cardinals are making noise that they expect to be next in line for public handouts for the next round of upgrades to Busch Stadium and Ballpark Village.

Stan Kroenke got his handouts, then trashed St. Louis on the way out of town. Developer Paul McKee got his, and so did the Green Street development team and the Lux Living team. If you’re wealthy, you get your handouts up front, and then sometimes leave the city holding the bag with an unpaid tax bill or collapsing building on the back end.

If you’re poor, the city gets sued before you get your first $500 check.

Poor people can’t afford lobbyists, so they don’t get the benefit of having a passel of lawyers pretty-up the language of a modest legislative attempt to pull them out of poverty.

But let’s call the guaranteed basic income program, which is being tried in some version in , what it is. Giving people direct payments is not much different, at least in spirit, than the wildly popular child tax credit. That credit, when it was increased during the pandemic, led to many of us getting monthly checks from the federal government for a period of time.

It was a redistribution of wealth, just like the Paycheck Protection Program loans to businesses that were forgiven. The child tax credit was one of the most successful programs in American history in terms of pulling children out of poverty, according to research from the Federal Reserve and . It should have been extended, but, again, poor people don’t have lobbyists.

Indeed, this is what most government debates come down to, even though neither side of the political aisle wants to admit it: dividing America’s pie and deciding who gets the biggest slice.

When American politicians were debating the Affordable Care Act before it became law in 2010, for instance, Republicans derided the expansion of the health care system as a “redistribution of wealth.�

ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ weren’t wrong.

Fourteen years into the overwhelmingly popular and successful program known as Obamacare, is one of its hallmarks. Several studies have shown that the decrease in income inequality was particularly strong in states that expanded Medicaid to cover more poor people who didn’t have access to quality health care.

In 2017, it was Democrats who applied the “redistribution of wealth� charge to a Republican plan, pushed by former President Donald Trump, to cut taxes for the wealthy. Again, they were not wrong. As expected, the tax cuts , without producing the promised economic gains.

Meanwhile, St. Louis, a city with concentrated poverty, is facing a double-barreled attack. One lawsuit is redistributing public money away from already underfunded services, and another is trying to take money out of the hands of the people who need it most.

The rich get richer, and the poor get left behind.

It’s the wealth redistribution pattern that has defined St. Louis for more than 200 years.