With Tax Day again upon us, two story lines will predictably dominate the media coverage on April 15th. In their perpetual war on taxes, conservatives will claim that rates are too high even as those Americans who receive tax credits get "welfare." Meanwhile, frothing-at-the-mouth Tea Partiers will protest about being "Taxed Enough Already."
Sadly, the numbers tell a different tale. After a decade of the Bush tax cuts, it’s clear that only one side is fighting – and winning – the class war. As for the Tea Baggers, they aren’t merely, as Jon Stewart suggested last year, "confusing tyranny with losing." They are confused about so much more.
Here, then, are 10 Inconvenient Truths for Tax Day:
- Over 95% of Working Households Got Tax Cuts
- Only 2% of Tea Baggers Know Obama Cut Their Taxes…
- …and 52% of Tea Partiers Think Their Taxes are Fair…
- …and Think the Federal Tax Level is Over Double What It Is
- 1% of Families Earned 24% of All Income…
- …and 57% of All Capital Income
- 400 Richest Taxpayers Saw Incomes Double, Tax Rates Halved
- Only 1 in 500 Families Pay the Estate Tax
- Corporate Taxes Have Plummeted as a Share of GDP
- The U.S. Loses $345 Billion a Year to Tax Evasion and Fraud
As crazy as the tea party movement is over taxes along with Limbaugh/Palin/O’Reilly and the rest of the teabaggers, a new survey by the very conservative American Enterprise Institute says that Americans feel they are paying just about the right amount of taxes and that Bush’s tax cuts only helped the rich and Big Business and should be ended.
For all the grousing about taxes these days, a new survey concludes that it’s doing taxes rather than paying them that really rankles.
A plurality of Americans think they’re paying about the right amount in taxes, and a significant majority say they’re paying the fair amount.
There is widespread agreement that the rich and corporations are paying too little in taxes. And a majority of Americans think the Bush tax cuts helped the rich the most and should be eliminatedAmericans are also vastly more concerned right now about unemployment and the economy than they are about taxes — or deficits, for that matter.
A troubling answer that Dan highlights is that Americans, by a slim margin, prefer Republicans over Democrats when it comes to taxes. We can thank the right wing noise machine for that. Only in America can a president like George Bush screw up the country for almost a decade and in a blink of an eye it’s lost on most people that all these conservatives acting like racist sore losers stood by every one of Bush’s economic policies.
I think it’s sad that the political debate in our country is not about specific issues. It’s about Straw Men – Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Liberalism, Conservativism. And who even cares about the last round of this malarkry – Stem Cell Reasearch, Gay Marriage, Abortion? None of those Talking Point things are really even on the table. This Tea Party business doesn’t feel grass roots to me. It feels like a great big fat manipulation of the political process. We’re not overtaxed. The majority of people don’t even think we’re overtaxed, even when polled by the center of the Conservative Universe – A.E.I.
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