Of all the seemingly shocking statistics that Conservatives love to sputter in defense of their regressive tax policies, their favorite must be that 47 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax. Astounding, isn’t it? How can those pinko-commie hippies at Occupy Wall Street complain about tax cuts for the rich, when almost half the nation doesn’t pay taxes?
By now, chances are you’ve seen or heard about the secret video taken at a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser for Mitt Romney last May, recently released by Mother Jones magazine, during which he grumbled to attendees about this very segment of the population:
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it … And they will vote for this president no matter what.”
Uh, seriously?
Aside from the fact that Romney blatantly insulted half the nation — nice one, Willard — his comment was disingenuous for the same reason that any mention of this fact by the Right is disingenuous: These almost 147 million citizens, for whom Romney evidently holds such contempt, are actually too poor, too elderly or too young to pay income taxes.
Of the 47 percent who pay no income tax, about half don’t earn enough to even qualify for the lowest tax bracket and still pay several other taxes, including payroll taxes, state and local sales taxes, excise or sin taxes, and gas taxes.
The threshold below which a family of four is exempt from paying income tax was $26,400 last year, and it goes without saying that the other taxes such a household is required to pay are more than substantial.
The other half of citizens with no income tax liability consists of households that benefit from tax credits for senior citizens, students or the working poor.
Any time anti-tax conservatives and right-libertarians cite the 47 percent statistic, all they’re doing is misleading average middle-class Americans into favoring their brand of deficit-exploding supply-side economics, the cornerstone of which is counterproductive tax cuts for the wealthy.
Despite the fact that businesses typically make their decisions based solely on whether those decisions will result in profit, supply-siders justify slashing tax rates for the rich by portraying them as “job creators,” as if businesses will magically hire new workers simply because they’re swimming in money.
If this were the case, we wouldn’t have the unemployment crisis we’re experiencing now. Tax cuts for the rich yield only two outcomes: increased income inequality, which is already higher than at any time since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, and drastic worsening of our budget deficit.
Now Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are running on the same supply-side policy positions that have crashed our economy and given rise to a new Gilded Age in which the 400 wealthiest people in the U.S. own more wealth than the bottom half of all Americans combined — more than 150 million people. Of course, a politician is perfectly capable of advocating these ludicrous positions without needlessly bashing more than 140 million Americans.
One would think that after the considerable number of blunders Romney has already made on the campaign trail (“Corporations are people, my friend!”), he’d probably want to avoid painting half the nation as blind freeloaders.
But the truth is, he was simply feeding the robber barons at the fundraiser exactly what they wanted to hear.
When Romney tells a room of rich individuals they are the responsible, productive class while everyone else is a lazy parasite, he’s drawing on decades of right-wing rhetoric meant to dupe working people into voting against their own economic self-interests.
Apparently, this is how Romney aims to win the election. Don’t be fooled.
Moisés Reyes is a journalism graduate student. His column appears on Fridays.
