The New Unfairness Doctrine
Up until now I hadn’t dawned on me just how twisted the Republican candidates have become. I wanted one of them to be sensible so as to provide a challenge to Obama who, in my opinion, needs a very firm kick up the rear end in order to generate a little energetic activity. After all the economy still lingers on the brink of stalling, and nowhere in Washington is there any evidence of a likely attack on the problem. Obama has promised a “major” speech on unemployment and jobs around Labor Day, which is after he and the other luminaries in DC have all returned from their well deserved holidays. Well deserved that is in their eyes alone. Their rest was earned not on the basis of successful action and curing our economic ills, but on the basis of the enormous effort it must have been to have been so totally ineffective for so long. Failure of that epic a proportion must surely be all-consuming. Hence the need for a break. In any case, I suspect, as with all of Obama’s major speeches, absolutely nothing of substance will follow. Never has so much rhetoric been so richly vacuous.
Where was I?
Ah yes: the Republicans.
I can now see why they are so distraught and and angry at the unfairness of society. They are aghast at the deep imbalance of our federal budget and the way we raise the cash that flows into our government’s coffers. They look at things through the same lens as my Tea Party friend. To summarize: it’s those awful moochers. Oh. The unfairness of it all.
Yes those lazy layabouts who don’t contribute anything, but get showered in benefits. Republicans hate redistribution. Libertarians hate pretty much everything except their precious personal liberty. Mix the two, and we get insight into modern Republicanism. The one group decries the notion of trying to correct for the distortions inherent in society. The other group decries the notion of society itself.
It’s those “others”. The ones who deceive, lie, and otherwise cheat their way to a wonderfully rich existence on the backs of the ever trusting hard working “good” Americans – who, it turns out, are mainly white, middle aged, own homes, and live in the South or West. You know those moochers: the underserving poor. The lazy unemployed who refuse to work for nothing. They wallow purposefully in poverty in order to avoid having enough income to pay income tax. They embrace poverty with gusto just to mooch of the largesse of libertarians. A largesse stolen and ripped away by the violence, no less, of the democratic process known as central government. AKA: “We The People”.
Apparently our economy would be dandy were it not for these moochers. Or, at least, we would have no budget difficulties.
I came to this realization after my latest argument with my Tea Party friend, who is fed up supporting said moochers who are multiplying rapidly, so he steadfastly refuses to incur any national debt simply to see the cash go to them and their nefarious schemes. The anger is palpable. He was quite willing for the country to go into fully fledged depression rather than continue to pay for the layabouts.
At first I thought he was an outlier. Now I realize he is mainstream modern Republican, at least as personified by their presidential candidates.
In a nutshell the problem of insufficient Federal government revenue – as witnessed by the current deficit – is a function of the proportion of people who pay no tax. No income tax that is. These are the aforesaid evil moochers.
When I originally heard this argument put forward, by Senator Hatch on the Senate floor, I laughed it off as a sign of the disconnect an elderly Senator from a very sparsely populated state must have when confronted with large scale problems like income inequality, poverty, and unemployment. He seemed genuinely shocked to have discovered that there are people out there too poor to pay income tax. That this was a consequence of the great divide in our society eluded him entirely. And that this divide is a direct consequence of the deregulatory and pro-business policies he has supported over the past thirty years didn’t dawn on him. Instead he implied that it was both an injustice and a sign of moral malaise. The reason that first sprang to his mind that best explained this horrible situation was the moocher one: they are cheating somehow. It wasn’t, in his account, that they are too poor.
This attitude has now become mainstream Republican thinking. Last weekend Jon Huntsman, who hitherto had nothing in common with the far right wingers like Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann, was agreeing with the wall Street Journal’s view that our tax base is too narrow. The WSJ asked if:
“the half of American households no longer paying income tax‰ÛÓmainly working poor families and seniors‰ÛÓshould be brought onto the income tax rolls.”
All the Republican candidates heartily agreed. Expand the tax base by taxing the poor. Wow.
Our problem of low revenue is not because the rich are not paying their fair share. It is because the poor are not paying enough. So the party that has made life and death resistance to raising taxes on the rich a core part of its loyalty test, is now embracing raising taxes on the poor.
So we need, in current Republican parlance, to tax the poor more in order to be fair to the rich. Those rich folks have such a hard time of it, they need every ounce of help we can muster.
This extraordinary inversion of sensibility is now de rigueur on the right, even amongst so-called centrists like Huntsman. And it completely overlooks that rather simple fact that anyone earning a wage at all pays tax. A regressive tax to boot. It’s called payroll tax. But let’s not allow facts to get in the way of our unfairness doctrine. Facts are unfair to the rich too. Or so it seems.
Let me run that by you again: it is only fair that the poor pay more taxes, they are not shouldering enough of a burden. So we should resist raising taxes on those who have higher incomes, and raise them on those who earn the least. It’s only fair after all.
This astonishingly anti-social version of fairness has taken hold. It sounds right to the Tea Party folks. It motivates their attacks on the poor – henceforth known as layabouts, moochers, or simply “them”. In Rick Perry’s words:
“we’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax.”
That this attitude could flourish is a sure sign of the degeneration of the values upon which the existing middle class was built: the concept of a social contract that protected the very poor, the weak, and the elderly whilst encouraging sufficient profit to fuel rapid growth. It eludes all these Republicans that those periods of history experiencing the most rapid economic growth were invariably those with higher tax rates. I make no claim to a causal relationship there. But there is no evidence that higher tax rates produce the ominous collapse of initiative and economic activity that the right likes to scare us with either.
Ironically, the person who makes the most sense, in terms of logic, is Ron Paul the libertarian. He argues against all forms of income tax because he wants to destroy modern statist America totally, and turn the US into a series of self reliant cantons run by Randian heroes and other exemplars of the rugged individual self centered life so adored by libertarians everywhere.
OK I am being a bit harsh on my libertarian friends. Not really. Their dystopian view of America is an absurdity that only they could embrace.
Meanwhile if this is the new tax policy emerging from the Republicans, and it appears that it is, then phrases like “closing tax loopholes” take on a very different character.
The attack on the underprivileged seems well under way.
Well, they deserve it don’t they? After all they are moochers. Not like those nice bankers. They’re all so wholesome.
But wait. The bankers figured this all out. They realized that the best scam to pull off in modern America is to be dirt poor. That way you can avoid paying taxes and become a true moocher. Their mistake was in execution: they accidentally made everyone else poor and not themselves. Doh. Now they are stuck being rich and still having to pay taxes.
Life is just unfair at times, isn’t it?
