Orrin Hatch Thinks The Tax System Is Unfair Because It Doesn’t Tax Poor People Enough

by Travis Waldron
from ThinkProgress

In an effort to fend off Democratic budgetary proposals that include higher tax rates on the rich and corporations, Congressional Republicans are dusting off one of their favorite talking points: that America’s debt and deficits are caused entirely by spending and not at all by decreasing revenue streams. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made the argument on the Senate floor yesterday, saying: “We all know that raising taxes would stall the rebound we all claim to want. Let’s just admit we don’t have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, has been making the argument in a different way, pushing a recent report that 51 percent of Americans don’t pay any income taxes. To Hatch and his Republican colleagues, the report is perfect evidence that the rich already pay too much in taxes. The answer to that problem, as Hatch explained on MSNBC’s Daily Rundown today, is to revamp the tax code in order to make middle- and lower-class Americans pay their fair share:

HOST: Do you reform the tax code system? The president’s own fiscal commission came out and said that if we reform the tax code, you could save and add a trillion dollars.

HATCH: Well, Bastiat, the great economist of the past said, the place where you’ve got to get revenues has to come from the middle class. That’s the huge number of people that are there. So the system does need to be revamped. As far as, I think I made the point that if you just go with what the president says about the wealthy, you might get $36 billion compared to the $1.5 trillion expenditure this year, or should I say deficit this year. And the problem with that is that you hit about 800,000 small businesses where the jobs are created that would hopefully get enough people to pay taxes. So, yeah, we have an unbalanced tax code that we’ve got to change.

(More here. LP NOTE: When the income tax was first conceived it was intended to apply only to the wealthy. There were several reasons for this: 1] Other forms of taxes and duties provided the bulk of the government's revenue. 2] The framers of the income tax believed that the wealthy gained the most from the benefits of government and therefore had the obligation to pay the most for its upkeep. And 3] They also believed that citizens should be able to care for themselves and their families before having to pay income taxes. This was not some pie-in-the-sky belief. Rather it was derived from 18th century economist Adam Smith, who wrote: "The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities.")