The other day I covered how the 53%ers are apparently against the very policies they have advocated for years. The 47% of people not paying federal income tax do so in a large part because of the Bush tax cuts and we know the right has been a long time advocate of those tax cuts. Now let’s look at a chart of those 47% that don’t pay federal income tax and what composes that group, courtesy of the Brookings Institute:
Brookings explains the breakdown as such:
- Approximately 70 percent are working people who pay payroll taxes. As noted above, even the low-income households in this group pay substantial federal income taxes over time. The main options to force these people to pay federal income tax in years when their incomes are low include cutting the EITC or the Child Tax Credit, which would tend to reduce work incentives and increase child poverty and welfare use, and lowering the standard deduction or personal exemption, which could tax many low-income working families into, or deeper into, poverty.
- An additional 17 percent of people who did not pay federal income taxes in 2009 are people aged 65 or older. The main option to make these individuals pay federal income tax would be to subject their Social Security benefits to taxation.[18]
- The remaining 13 percent consists largely of students, people with disabilities, the long-term unemployed, and others with very low taxable incomes.[19] To make these people pay federal income taxes, policymakers would have to tax disability, veterans’, and similar benefits or make full-time students and the long-term jobless individuals borrow (or draw from any available savings) to pay taxes on their meager incomes.
So these 53%ers want to force more children into poverty. They also want to start taxing the disabled, including veterans. How patriotic is that?
The 99%ers out there are helping fight so that the rich in this country pay their fair share. This is not some crazy left wing idea. It was an idea even shared by Ronald Reagan while he was President. The right’s answer to this has been accusations of “class warefare” and risks of raising taxes on the middle and lower class. It still amazes me the number of people in the middle and lower class who buy into the right wing meme on this. They don’t realize they are supporting politicians who want to hurt them in the long run in order to save the wealthiest in this nation a few dollars.