Wednesday, July 6, 2011

The Top Five Things Conservatives Say That Piss Me Off- Part One

I was going to make a blog post with a list of the five things conservatives say in comments sections and letters to the editor that really set my teeth on edge, but once I started ranting I couldn’t hold myself back. Instead, I’m going to make this a series. I know it looks like a countdown, but these things are really in no particular order, since they all piss me off about equally.


#5- “Half of the people in America don’t pay income tax”

This one isn’t even a lie. It is true that about 47% of Americans were projected to pay no income tax in 2009, according to the Tax Policy Center. The problem with this statement is that it is usually used in a misleading way to back up their further claim that there is a freeloader class in America. And there are two reasons why this statistic does not prove that, because there are two reasons why a person would not pay any income tax in America. First, there are the people whose income is too low to pay income tax. There is technically no income too low to pay taxes, but anyone who makes less than the standard deduction would in effect owe no tax without anything else coming into play. For 2011, that would be a single person making less than $5,800, and for a married couple filing jointly, that would be $11,600. I’m really not sure what blood conservatives expect to squeeze out of that particular stone. If 47% of Americans were falling below that income level, then a better question would be—why are so many Americans so damn poor? If I came across someone who was trying to survive on less than six thousand dollars a year, my instinct would be to try to help that person, not to demand they pay more of their “fair share”. Certainly, I would not assume that they are receiving all the same benefits I am from the tax dollar pot. For example, a person living in poverty that extreme probably isn’t driving, so why should they have to pay to pave the roads for those more fortunate? If this person is receiving any form of government assistance, I would certainly not hold it against them. For many people, though, those benefits are an example of how “some people pay into the pot, and some people only take out.” This brings us to the second group of people who pay no tax.


Again, there are people who pay no income tax simply because their income is too low. That number could not possibly be 47% of our population, so what else is going on here? Well, there are the people who pay no tax because they get enough credits, exemptions, and deductions to drop their tax liability to zero.(source) On the normal end of that spectrum, you would have a family of four with two children under 17. As long as their income is below 50K, they pay no tax, thanks to deductions, child credits, etc. This means that many of the same people who are complaining about people not paying taxes are probably not paying taxes, either. Sure, there are taxes that are deducted from their paycheck each week, but they get the whole thing back in April. Granted, they don’t get paid any interest on the loan they gave the government, so that could be considered a cost, if they had been planning on investing that money. However, how many struggling families of four do you know who invest a significant portion of their income? Not many, since they need just about every two cents they can scrape together just to get by. Again, I don’t begrudge those families anything, (disclosure-for most of my adult life, I was one of those families) because they just don’t have much else to give. They are doing the job of raising the next generation of Americans, and it’s a pretty tough job in this economy. Additionally, most of these families, while they are not paying income tax, are not taking much else “out of the pot.” Some of them may qualify for free health care for their children, but not for themselves. Some may get WIC benefits when they are pregnant or have small children. However, many families making incomes in the range hovering just under 50K do not qualify for most government assistance, and could hardly be called “freeloaders”.


So, is this it? Does this cover the entire 47% of Americans who don’t pay income tax? Really poor people and struggling lower-middle class families? Nope. As an aside, I’d like to remind everyone that even these people I’ve mentioned don’t pay zero tax. There are still Social Security and Medicare taxes, excise taxes, sales tax, property tax, etc. No one escapes paying taxes in America. However, there is a group that certainly tries. Back in 2005, there were 7,385 tax returns with income over $200K that reported no federal income tax liability.(source) This is only the people who used charitable donations, tax paid overseas, etc. to reduce their tax liability. It is not even counting all of the people who use “losses” from one business venture to offset their “returns” from another. That’s right, folks, there are literally thousands of rich people who pay no income tax. They have luxury cars, yachts, and nice big homes, but don’t pay anything into the pot. They only take out, in the form of farm subsidies, subsidies to oil companies, and other nifty government programs. That means that those of us in the middle class are really paying welfare to two groups of people—those who are less fortunate, and those who are much, much more fortunate. Michelle Bachman, for example, famously received 50K in farm subsidies in 2008 for her $250K stake in her father-in-law’s farm.(source) This means that she received more in other people’s tax dollars that year than many of the so called “freeloaders” made, period. Yet, for some reason, this doesn’t piss conservatives off. It’s terrible when poor people, who don’t have any money to begin with, don’t pay taxes or (God forbid) receive benefits from the government, but it’s okay for rich people, who have the money lying around in fancy Ming vases, to not pay any taxes, or even to take more out of the tax dollar pot than they put in. Why do they have this strange standard for who should pay taxes? Stay tuned tomorrow for “Rich people create jobs.”

1 comment:

  1. Thanks to a commenter on Facebook, who sent the link to the table- http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/UploadedPDF/1001289_who_pays.pdf

    1.5% of millionares pay no income tax.

    ReplyDelete