Republicans preferred to give dividend tax cuts to the rich instead of child credits to the poor. Why do Republicans hate the poor so much?
Plenty of middle-class families will be getting the credit. Isn’t the conservative American dream all about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps? The credit would have especially helped low-income folks, most in need of a demonstration of “compassionate conservatism”, to do just that.
(So perhaps my question should be: why do Republicans hate America so much?)
Don’t the poor get EITC? Don’t the really poor also pay a 0% marginal rate?
Until you’ve shown that the omission of one benefit (a tax credit, which implicitly is based upon meaningful tax debits, i.e., some meaningful contribution to the tax rolls), vis a vis a group who does receive two additional benefits not necessarily available to all the middle-class or “rich” (i.e., the EITC and low to no federal tax burden, as well as perhaps drawing on certain entitlement programs), I don’t think you’ve demonstrated what you think you’ve demonstrated. (Note that I’m buying into, for the moment, your amateur psychonalytic theory that the only reason for allocating economic benefits and burdens in a particular way is “hatred” of the party burdened – which I think you would disclaim if it were attributed to you vis a vis your apparent preference to shift more/all of these economic burdens to the middle class/“rich” – though maybe you wouldn’t disclaim it).
Another way of putting it is there is only so much you can cut the taxes of people who pay very little tax.
Others have demonstrated/can demonstrate that the tax system of the U.S. has over the past years moved more and more toward one in which the “very rich” pay a larger proportion of all federal revenues, and the “very poor” pay a minute share. If the poor aren’t taking appreciably less in gov’t services (maybe they are; cite it), then the net effect is that the tax regime overall is increasingly balanced on the shoulders of the upper middle class and rich, to the benefit of everyone (including the poor) below, and the “flatness” that in the past was sought to ensure everyone paid some tax burden is less and less present.
If King George Voinovich is a Republican in anything but name, I’m a rocket scientist. The man is simply a political weasel without the slightest ideology.
WSJ’s views on taxes are non-neutral and well known, but no one really disputes the trend toward many low-income people paying no effective tax at all. How can additional “tax benefits” be paid to those who are effectively outside the tax system?
Now if, Saxman, you really mean that additional income redistribution to these non-taxpayers (i.e., the 26% of all tax filers who end up paying nothing – the “poor,” if you will) is in order, then say so. But just as Costco can’t really do much in terms of special sales prices or coupons for people who don’t shop at its stores, the IRS can’t be the mechanism for affirmatively enriching people who are marginally or not at all within its clutches.
Perhaps you’d get a more useful answer if you asked a more useful question. That is, before one can address “why do Republicans hate the poor,” one must first demonstrate that Republicans do, in fact, hate the poor. When come back, bring argument.
This, my friend, is a very deceiving claim. First of all, you talk about “all federal revenues” and yet the arguments I see in WSJ and elsewhere talk only about federal income tax revenues. You have conveniently ignored all of the payroll tax revenues, a significant portion of federal revenues that are paid by everyone. And, these taxes are regressive in that they only apply to earned income and most of it (all but the Medicare piece) cuts out beyond some point (around $90,000, I believe). [This, by the way, leaves out discussions of the effects of state and local taxes, which are almost always levied in a regressive manner.]
Second, even if you restrict the discussion to the federal income tax (for no good reason that I can see), if you look at the actual statistics on the share of federal income tax that the richest 1% pay and the share of the total AGI (adjusted gross income) they earned, you find that the reason why the share of the income tax paid has about doubled over the past 20-odd years has nothing to do with the tax system becoming more progressive and has everything to do with the explosion in inequality in income. In particular, in that same time period where their share of the federal income tax has doubled, their share of the AGI has gone up by a factor of 2.5. [At the very bottom end, unlike the very top end, the federal income tax has become somewhat more progressive because of expansion of the earned income tax credit.]
Blah blah blah Republicans are evil, soulless, unenlightened primates who hate the poor and blacks and women and kick puppies and yadda yadda yadda. The fact that this isn’t The Pit prevents me from saying too much, but Saxman, why don’t you ask yourself this: Isn’t it at least theoretically possible that Republicans don’t hate any one group, they just have a different set of opinions on what is best for the country (and the economy) as a whole? That perhaps we believe that, given the choice between giving a few poor people a few hundred dollars, and giving one not-so-poor person a couple thousand, the latter is the one that will help the economy more, thus ultimately benefitting every, poor included?
Now, I’m not asking you to agree with that assessment - you’re free to think it’s the stupidest idea on the planet, if you so desire. But are you really so narrow-minded as to be incapable of at least conceding it as a possibility that us Republicans simply disagree with you?
Honestly, for a group that prides itself on tolerance, understanding and diversity, liberals seem to come up with a whole lotta “Why are Republicans so evil/stupid/racist?” threads around here.
Jeff
You know, I am really happy you linked to this because it gives me a chance to demonstrate to you and others how the WSJ editorial page staff lies and deceives with statistics!
WSJ says:
Note how they imply in the first sentence that they are going to show that the system [by which they conveniently mean only the federal income tax system] is “steeply progressive”. However, the statistics that they then cite prove nothing of the sort. To show it to be steeply progressive, you have to show that it takes a much larger bite, percentagewise, out of high income earners than lower income earners. But, their numbers can’t tell you that because they have only told you the share of federal income taxes paid by a certain group of people (such as the top 10%) without telling you the share of total income earned by this group! For example, the fact that the top 10% pay 56% of the federal income taxes does not necessarily mean that the system is steeply progressive. (If they earned 70% of the income, then that would show that the system was actually somewhat regressive. In reality, one can look up the statistics here (which is, by the way, a right of center organization) and find that the top 10% earn 35% of the income (as measured by the AGI…adjusted gross income). So, the system is somewhat progressive but not as steeply progressive as they want you to believe. And, certainly the data that they have presented is insufficient to tell you anything about progressivity.)
WSJ goes on to say:
As I noted before, the implication here is that the progressivity of the tax system has been increasing. But, the reality (at the top, at any rate) is that these changes are just a symptom of a larger disease: the incredible increase in inequality of income over the past 15 or 20 years. So, yes, the top 10% have gone from paying 42% to 56% of the federal income tax since 1986 but their share of the income (AGI) has gone from 24% to 35%; in fractional terms, their increase in income share has slightly outpaced their increase in federal income tax share.
So, what you have here is a case where the WSJ has left the implication that the tax system is growing steadily more progressive when, in fact, there has been some increase in progressivity at the bottom but no increase at the top. Rather, the increasing federal income tax burden on the rich is due to their increasing income share! This, of course, makes it seem rather perverse to be advocating making the tax system less progressive. It is akin to saying “We have to decrease taxes on the rich lest they end up paying too much of the income tax due to the fact that they have an ever larger share of the income.” In other words, the solution to exploding inequality is to decrease income taxes on the rich! Only the WSJ editorial page (and the current Administration and Republican Congress) could come up with such perverse ideas!
One reason for doing so is that Saxman chose to levy his charge of unfairness specifically in the context of the federal income tax system, and not (say) “overall contributions to and benefits received from government”). He’s complaining that the poor didn’t get one bottom-line IRS tax benefit available to some others (while they did get other bottom line benefits not available to those others).
Another is that the medicare and social security and other taxes that you mention corellate (at least theoretically; let’s see how long they survive) to insurance/pension deposits that each payor will eventually draw out (in greater or lesser degree). And consider two earners – one works for the minimum number of quarters over the last ten years before retirement, at a $10,000 salary level; one works every quarter for forty years at a $90,000 level. I’m pretty sure the latter guy won’t get a monthly benefit that is 36 times higher than the former guy, even though that’s the proportion of their incomes (and the tax contribution each has made, assuming a flat payroll tax rate). (In fact, modeling this on the SSA webpage for someone retiring this year, and ignoring the fact that the payroll “cutoff” and rates have likely fluctuated over time, the “rich” guy will qualify for a max. monthly S.S. check of $1714, or just over six (not 36) times the “poor” guy’s check of $256)). So I’m not sure of your basis for flatly declaring the payroll taxes “regressive.” See http://www.ssa.gov/retire2/AnypiaApplet.html.
**
So we are talking about redistribution of income via the tax code. Fine. But say so.
And . . .??? This doesn’t necessarily demonstrate that the “poor” have been hurt by the rich doing better. Assuming that everyone (rich and poor) earns their income (big assumption, at both levels, I know), demonstrating that one of them has seen his income go substantially up doesn’t mean that, say, he’s taking more out of the government in the form of services, nor does it mean that the “poor” guy (whose “take” from the government has not necessarily gone down, proportionally) has had food taken off his table – unless you espouse a Proudhon/Marxian theory that all property is a form of theft, there can be no winners without losers, etc. Which is fine, but is not the basis on which the U.S. Tax Code has ever been enacted.
A different way of putting this is, how are you so certain that you know the “right” amount that the “rich” and “poor” ought to pay in order to reduce “income inequality?”
Also, in a country in which very few “poor” people are suffering from clinical malnutrition, and many of the “poor” (i.e., those on the low end of the “income inequality” curve) have cable television and cellphones and wear the same clothes as the “middle class” or “rich,” there is an argument that “income inequality,” standing alone, should not/need not drive fiscal or tax policy to the extent that right reason/morality would have compelled a similarly-proportional “inequality” to be eliminated when the difference between rich and poor was between affluence and instant starvation, not affluence and . . . living in diminished circumstances. A thought for a different thread, perhaps, but a flip side of “the poor you shall always have with you.”
By the way, I do agree with the conservatives in this thread that the polices do not show that “the Republicans hate the poor” (any more than opposing the war in Iraq shows that one loves Saddam Hussein).
The question is not one of who they hate and who they like but who their policies benefit and who they hurt. By putting it in terms of hating the poor, Saxman, you are unfortunately creating a nice strawman for the conservatives here to pounce on so that they can conveniently ignore the broader policy issues.
And, as several have noted/implied, macro- or micro- economic discussions probably unduly the OP, which was based on an (intentionally, I suppose) inflammatory premise having little to do with realistic analysis of why various political constituencies might choose among a multitude of possible economic/tax schemes.
The libertarians and other foes of the tax code as currently constituted would point to the inflammatory charges and countercharges as support for the premise that govt. should not constitute itself as the dispenser of economic boons or burdens, or anointer of “winners” and “losers” and “good guys” and “bad guys” in the marketplace. Once the govt. sets up a zero sum game (as between rich and poor), of course there will be gaming. The rich can/will use their money to influence the allocation. The poor can/will use their greater numbers and one-man/one-vote rules.
The OP, as phrased, seems to me proof of the “The Tax Code Is An Invitation To Class Warfare” school of thought.