The new “black is the new white” meme among Republicans is that low taxes are good-except if you’re one of those lazy freeloading 47% of Americans who don’t pay income taxes. Then you’re a grifter, and poor, and you’re not paying your fair share, and deserve contempt.
This ignores payroll taxes, state and local taxes, gas taxes, excise taxes and much more. But to hear conservatives talk about it, you’d think these people’s entire tax burden was $0.00. In April, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), citing similar data, claimed “According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, 49 percent of households are paying 100 percent of taxes coming in to the federal government.” Notice the absence of the key qualifier, “income.” And Grassley’s far from alone.
The plutocrats smell blood. The people who have labored hard to destroy this country for their own gain are going in for the kill. Presumably they would be happy that half of the country pays no federal income taxes, but the ideology of “low taxes” is, apparently, only for the wealthy. The rest is an attempt at demonization of this shadowy group of super-scary people who are lazy and leeching off the providence of the “screw you, I’ve got mine” crowd.
