Tea partiers lack tax facts
Tom Maertens
Mankato Free Press
Ninety-seven percent of Americans received a tax cut this year under the Recovery and Reinvestment act (the “stimulus”), which contained $244 billion in tax cuts. According to the Tax Policy Center, “A family of four ... will pay only 4.6 percent of its income in federal income taxes this year,” the second-lowest percentage in the past 50 years.
What about taxes on the wealthy? Between 2001 and 2007, according to the IRS, the average income of the 400 richest taxpayers more than doubled, to $345 million, while their effective tax rate plummeted from 29.4 percent in 1993 to only 16.6 percent. That’s hardly crushing taxation.
You wouldn’t know any of this from Tax Day protests. But then, according to a February CBS poll, only 2 percent of tea partiers know that Obama cut taxes while 44 percent think he raised their taxes. That’s what comes of watching Fox News.
Is it corporate taxes worrying the tea partiers? According to the GAO, two-thirds of all American corporations paid no corporate taxes between 1995 and 2008. Exxon and General Electric made $35 billion and $10.3 billion respectively last year, but paid zero corporate taxes.
Some are suddenly alarmed about the deficit. Did they protest while George W. Bush turned Clinton’s projected $5 trillion surplus into a $5.6 trillion dollar deficit? Did they protest Bush’s $700 billion bank bailout?
What the tea partiers really look like are mostly old, uninformed white people who are angry at being out of power and want to “take back” their country from a black man in the White House. Taxes are simply a politically-acceptable pretext the right-wing noise machine uses to manipulate them.
Mankato Free Press
Ninety-seven percent of Americans received a tax cut this year under the Recovery and Reinvestment act (the “stimulus”), which contained $244 billion in tax cuts. According to the Tax Policy Center, “A family of four ... will pay only 4.6 percent of its income in federal income taxes this year,” the second-lowest percentage in the past 50 years.
What about taxes on the wealthy? Between 2001 and 2007, according to the IRS, the average income of the 400 richest taxpayers more than doubled, to $345 million, while their effective tax rate plummeted from 29.4 percent in 1993 to only 16.6 percent. That’s hardly crushing taxation.
You wouldn’t know any of this from Tax Day protests. But then, according to a February CBS poll, only 2 percent of tea partiers know that Obama cut taxes while 44 percent think he raised their taxes. That’s what comes of watching Fox News.
Is it corporate taxes worrying the tea partiers? According to the GAO, two-thirds of all American corporations paid no corporate taxes between 1995 and 2008. Exxon and General Electric made $35 billion and $10.3 billion respectively last year, but paid zero corporate taxes.
Some are suddenly alarmed about the deficit. Did they protest while George W. Bush turned Clinton’s projected $5 trillion surplus into a $5.6 trillion dollar deficit? Did they protest Bush’s $700 billion bank bailout?
What the tea partiers really look like are mostly old, uninformed white people who are angry at being out of power and want to “take back” their country from a black man in the White House. Taxes are simply a politically-acceptable pretext the right-wing noise machine uses to manipulate them.
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