"Romney’s theory of the “taker class,” and why it matters" by Ezra Klein at WP

[applegrove]

Romney’s theory of the “taker class,” and why it matters

by Ezra Klein at WP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/17/romneys-theory-of-the-taker-class-and-why-it-matters/

"SNIP.............................................

So 83 percent of those not paying federal income taxes are either working and paying payroll taxes or they’re elderly and Romney is promising to protect their benefits. The remainder, by and large, aren’t paying federal income or payroll taxes because they’re unemployed. But that’s a small fraction of the country.

But this argument is, in a way, a very clever policy two-step that’s less about who pays taxes now and more about who is going to pay to reduce the deficit in the coming years. Here’s how it works.

Part of the reason so many Americans don’t pay federal income taxes is that Republicans have passed a series of very large tax cuts that wiped out the income-tax liability for many Americans. That’s why, when you look at graphs of the percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, you see huge jumps after Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax reform and George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. So whenever you hear that half of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, remember: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush helped build that.

Some of those tax cuts for the poor were there to make the tax cuts for the rich more politically palatable. “Do you think we wanted to include a welfare payment to people who don’t pay taxes and call it a tax cut?” A top Bush administration official once asked me. “No. But that’s what we needed to do to get it done.”

..............................................SNIP"

[BeyondGeography]

1. The gist of it

So notice what happened here: Republicans have become outraged over the predictable effect of tax cuts they passed and are using that outrage as the justification for an agenda that further cuts taxes on the rich and pays for it by cutting social services for the non-rich.

[applegrove]

2. That is what psychopaths do. They cause something to happen resulting in some behaviour,

then they get people to judge that inevitable behavioural outcome and see the victim of the psychopath's actions as bad.

[TomCADem]

3. Great Discussion of Why the 47% Number Is Used - Common RW Talking Point...

... that the wealthy use to argue that they are being oppressed.

However, as Ezra Klein points out, this does not include payroll taxes, thus even the 47% of Americans who many not pay income tax because the incomes are low do pay payroll tax at a higher effective rate than Mitt Romney's 13.9%.