It should come as no surprise to Republicans that people don’t like paying taxes. Nobody has liked paying taxes in all of recorded human history. Taxation has been and continues to be a burden.
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Taxation played a role in the coming of the American Revolution (everyone is familiar with the cry, “No taxation without representation”) and it is leading to unrest today as Republicans in bill after bill give tax cuts to the rich, adding to the tax burden of the middle class and poor to pay the 1 percent’s way to overseas tax shelters and villas, and on top of it off, suppress the vote of those on whom the burden mostly (and unfairly) falls.
Gallup’s annual Economy and Personal Finance poll reveals, “a robust majority, 61%, believe that upper-income people pay too little.” Perhaps more telling,
Nearly half of Americans, 49%, believe middle-income people — a group many Americans consider themselves part of — pay too much in taxes, up from 42% a year ago and the highest Gallup has found since 1999. At the same time, the 42% who say middle-income Americans pay their “fair share” in taxes is down 11 percentage points from last year.
What’s shocking is the number of people – largely Republicans who have drunk the Kool Aid – who say that the poor pay to little in taxes. That’s right. It’s not the rich who don’t pay enough. It’s the poor.
Gallup reveals that while a “plurality of Americans, 41%, say lower-income people pay too much in taxes” and “a third of Americans say the lower-income pay their fair share,” a staggering “23% say they pay too little, one point off the record high from 2012.”
More broadly, Gallup’s two-decade trend shows a clear increase in the percentage of Americans who believe the lower-income pay too little in taxes. The figure varied from 8% to 12% throughout the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s. It then jumped to between 13% and 17% in the late 2000s, and has consistently been near or above 20% since 2010.
What gives?
You only have to look as far as the Republican Party and it’s class warfare narrative of poor, greedy graspers wanting to have something that doesn’t belong to them. Gallup says that “A plurality of Republicans (40%) believe lower-income individuals pay too little in federal income taxes, far higher than the 22% of independents and 11% of Democrats who think so.”
But in 2011, The Huffington Post looked at the problem and concluded that,
Contrary to the rhetoric from Republicans that half of Americans are not paying income taxes, at the state level the poor are paying more than twice as much of their income toward taxes than the super rich. At the same time poverty levels have risen to highs not seen since 1993, with 15.1 percent of Americans officially classified as poor.
But those in the bottom 20 percent pay closer to 12 or 13 percent of their income in state and local taxes on average. The top 1 percent of income earners only pay 7 to 8 percent, according to the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy.
While the lowest 20 percent often pay 7 percent of their income in sales and excise taxes each year, the top 1 percent pay less than 1 percent of their income toward sales taxes.
According to HuffPo, “An analysis by ITEP concludes these excise taxes are 22 times harder on the poor than the rich, and 11 times harder on middle-income families than the rich.”
None of these facts matter to the Republican narrative, of course. Facts are cast aside in favor of demonizing the poor and elevating the rich to near divine status for things that have never, and will never do – that is, create jobs – and moreover something they have no interest in doing. The money, in the 1 percent’s view, is better spent on themselves.
To make matters worse, according to a new CNN study, the legislators writing our tax laws have an attitude of “do as I say, not as I do” as they seem unable – or unwilling – to pay their own taxes and then compound their sins by denying they never paid them in the first place.
From CNN:
The House Ways and Means Committee is the oldest, and arguably the most powerful, in Congress with members responsible for writing the nation’s tax laws.
But a CNN investigation of all 39 Democrats and Republicans on the committee found that at least eight members have faced tax problems of their own.
CNN cited Republicans Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY), Rep. Jim Renacci (R-OH), Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-OH), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Rep. Diane Black (R-TN), Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL), and Rep. Todd Young (R-IN). The only Democrat listed was New York’s Charles Rangel.
CNN quoted Steve Ellis of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense as saying,
Nobody wants to feel like a chump when they’re paying their taxes and if they see that their lawmakers, the ones who actually write the tax laws, aren’t paying their bills, it’s going to make them wonder why they’re paying theirs.
Of course, public shaming means nothing to a group that just continues to pretend it did nothing wrong, and that the poor are the culprits.
Lack of fairness in taxation is, of course, only part of the problem. It has become increasingly evident that if people only paid attention – if the mainstream media actually reported what is happening – that the Republican Party would not get a single vote from outside the ranks of the 1 percent, because the only people the GOP is for is the 1 percent. Their laws harm everybody else – women, children, minorities, non-Christians, gays and lesbians – the list is almost endless.
That Republicans are aware of this problem is shown by their increasing attempts to suppress the vote. The only way you can safely piss off the electorate is to take from the electorate their voice. The Supreme Court is complicit in this un-democratic scheme by allowing rich people to funnel as much money as they want into the political system, thus largely nullifying the voice of the people the Constitution was written for in the first place.
Welcome to Republican America, where government is for anyone but the people.
Photo from Center for American Progress
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
