The tea-bagging wackos keep making noise about how half the country doesn't pay taxes (they do this in service of people like Steve Forbes and Rush Limbaugh who are seeing their huge incomes taken back down to what they were in the Clinton years). A rational person would say "who are these people?" instead of "these people are CHEATING!". So are these people?
Well, it's actually closer to 1/3, and they do pay taxes, just not federal income taxes.
96% earn less than 40,000. They are people who have children and take them as deductions, thus substantially reducing their taxable income. Or they are children or students.
So the real issue is that income distribution in this country is so out of wack that 1/3 of the people make so little that if they paid taxes it would affect their ability to survive.
But that doesn't make a good slogan, because it's easier to rile people up to vote against their own interests if you make them think they're being cheated - not if they think others are suffering.
Some of the other fun things I've been seeing lately are:
- more than a quarter of medicare money goes to end-of-life care, and that can be cut back. Fine, but where are the statistics for how much is for people who have a chance of survival and how much is for radical intervention of very old and sick people? Just because someone dies after costly medical care does not mean their end was predictable. And this from the same people who raise the bogeyman of "rationed healthcare" to try to prevent universal insurance/care.
- on the topic of insurance - McCain's plan, which is still being trotted around by the right wing, has one of its core money-savers removing laws that state that insurers can't refuse to cover certain conditions (the ones that cut most into their profits, assumedly.) This will reduce the cost of policies so more can afford them. Well, duh. So there might be more people insured but they're underinsured, and when something catastrophic hits - sorry. Down the same black whole of debt and fear that the uninsured go down when something similar happens to them.
I really believe that there is something fundamentally different in these people that allows them to be this way.
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