Texas Gov. Rick Perry this week will try to revive his flagging presidential campaign by embracing an old conservative fancy ? the flat tax, while calling for ?scrapping the 3 million words of the current Tax Code.? Embracing the flat tax trumps the ?9-9-9? tax proposal that levitated Herman Cain?s candidacy. And it puts Perry at the head of what has become a bizarre GOP fixation ? the need to tax the poor.
Taxing the poor has become a badge of honor among conservatives. When Occupy Wall Street protesters launched their cry of ?We are the 99 percent,? the right-wing blogosphere responded, ?We are the 53 percent,? meaning the 53 percent of American households that they say pay federal income taxes.
Continue ReadingConservatives have become fixated on the notion that largely because of the Earned Income Tax Credit ? passed under Ronald Reagan and expanded under Bill Clinton ? almost half of all Americans pay no income taxes.
Perry launched his presidential campaign expressing dismay at the ?injustice that nearly half of all Americans don?t even pay any income tax.? And he was not alone. Every major candidate ? Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Mitt Romney and Cain ? has suggested that too many of the working poor aren?t paying income taxes, a position The Wall Street Journal describes as ?GOP doctrine.?
?We don?t have enough people paying taxes in this country,? said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a GOP vice presidential hopeful, who trumpets conservative gospel. ?We need to broaden the base so that everybody pays something,? said Bachmann. Only Ron Paul dissents ? saying he doesn?t want to raise taxes on anyone.
The argument is disingenuous. Working poor people do pay taxes. They pay a larger portion of their incomes in payroll taxes and sales taxes than the wealthy. And they pay property taxes indirectly in their rental costs. Poor workers pay about one-eighth of their incomes in taxes, on average.
?You know,? Perry said, ?the liberals out there are saying that we need to pay more.? That ?we? is apparently all those making more than $250,000 a year. For the rest of us, the fact that the working poor ? more than half of who make less than $20,000 ? don?t pay income taxes seems more like common sense than a moral outrage.
Instead, all the Republican presidential candidates are moving toward embracing a flatter tax structure ? one that inevitably benefits the rich and raises taxes on working families. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and the Robespierre of the Republican tax revolt, calls flatter taxes ?a consensus position in the center-right.?
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