New Republican Party Orthodoxy: Tax Poor People

http://www.slate.com/id/2302131/

It's not news when Jon Huntsman criticizes fellow Republicans. It's news when he agrees with them. On Sunday, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Huntsman found himself in a virtual love-in with Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann over, of all things, taxes. The paper asked Huntsman if "the half of American households no longer paying income tax—mainly working poor families and seniors—should be brought onto the income tax rolls."

He agreed, crediting the GOP's current front-runner for vice president, Sen. Marco Rubio, with the insight that "we don't have enough people paying taxes in this country."

The Journal called this position the "new GOP orthodoxy," which it is. When he announced his presidential bid two weeks ago, Perry told a room of conservative activists and bloggers that "we're dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don't even pay any income tax." He was following on Bachmann, who'd just told the South Carolina Christian Chamber of Commerce the very same thing.

"Part of the problem is today, only 53 percent pay any federal income tax at all; 47 percent pay nothing," said Bachmann. "We need to broaden the base so that everybody pays something, even if it's a dollar. Everyone should pay something, because we all benefit."

Don't you just love it? Income taxes are 'evil', so long as they are being applied to the most affluent citizens and corporations. However, taxing the working class is a 'must' (because that can help to lower taxes on the affluent even further). Forget the fact that lower income Americans pay a higher proportion of their overall income in taxes.

I thought that you don't have to pay taxes in USA, because it is unconstitutional, or something. Can someone enlighten me?

flatowkorps wrote:I thought that you don't have to pay taxes in USA, because it is unconstitutional, or something. Can someone enlighten me?

Looks like you have been exposed to a little too much Tea Bagger rhetoric. We have a federal income tax, as well as state income tax in a number of states. We also have various property taxes. (It is those particular progressive taxes that drive the conservatives so crazy in this country.) Then, of course, there are numerous consumption taxes, payroll taxes, etc.

In recent decades, progressive taxes have been steadily declining. Regressive taxes, on the other hand, are subject to greater fluctuation. The political right is determined to further reduce the tax burden on the wealthy by decreasing progressive tax rates and making up for the revenue losses through manifestly regressive means.

flatowkorps wrote:I thought that you don't have to pay taxes in USA, because it is unconstitutional, or something. Can someone enlighten me?

That is a silly assumption. No state can subsist without some form of tax revenue. In fact, capitalism itself requires that capitalists distribute a portion of the surplus value generated by workers to the state in order to perpetuate and facilitate the capitalist mode of production (e.g., private property and contract enforcement, creation of "business friendly" economies, provision of bourgeois education, police repressions of dissidents, imperialistic military operations, etc.). Of course, capitalists attempt to shift the tax burden necessary for the reproduction of their own privileged class onto the proletariat, which itself struggles (albeit far less successfully) to transfer as much of the tax burden as possible onto capitalists. Such contradictions are also aspects of the greater class struggle, and it isn't limited to the proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie, as there are opposing forces even within those classes, such as the struggle between the petit-bourgeoisie and the "high" bourgeoisie, which is exemplified by the reactionary Tea Party movement.

The Tea Party movement is a predominately petit-bourgeois or, to employ neoclassical terminology, "middle class" phenomenon which espouses right-wing populism. Its primary contention lies with the state's overwhelming bias toward high capital, which has produced such unsavory effects as exorbitant deficit spending and increased taxation of the working class and, to a lesser extent, the petit-bourgeoisie. Tea Party advocates therefore believe that the state itself is the problem due to its interference with the "proper" functioning of the free market and its "excessive" taxation. The irony here is the fact that it is the very system that these reactionaries uphold as a virtue that has resulted in the conditions they now decry as "unconstitutional." The high capitalist class benefits enormously from its state influence; this is why one is far more likely to find libertarians amongst shopkeepers and the self-employed than amongst corporate CEOs.

flatowkorps wrote:I thought that you don't have to pay taxes in USA, because it is unconstitutional, or something. Can someone enlighten me?

Nope, it is only unconstitutional to tax the rich here. According to the right wingers.

Thank you, now I got it.