Orrin Hatch

Senator Orrin Hatch made a fool of himself last week when he seemed to suggest that the poor were not paying their share of taxes. The middles class, he said, is paying too much, so we should not reverse the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. After all, he argued, is a $200,000 a year income truly wealthy? Worse, he told us the number of people not paying taxes because they are “poor” has leapt during the past two years. Obama is presumably tinkering with the law to attack the “wealthy”.

Oh dear. Where do we start?

I am often accused of having a left wing bias. This outburst from the worthy Senator helps explain that appearance

He’s not just a fool. He’s an ignorant fool.

But within his evident stupidity lies an important insight: he is representative of the Republican viewpoint during this crisis. They are clueless and heartless all at once.

What Hatch and his buddies do not seem to understand is that a large number of Americans do not pay taxes because they do not earn enough. They are not cheating. They are not evading tax. They simply are too poor. Truly poor. That our economy has become so tilted and twisted that the number of non tax payers can creep up to about half of all citizens is astonishing. Hatch doesn’t draw the right conclusion: that the economy needs urgent fixing in order to undo the inequality. No. Not at all. He gets mad that the people at the bottom are not sharing in the burden. He expresses bemusement. He flails around accusing Obama for something that has taken a very long time and a whole heap of Republican policies to create. We need, he says, to find ways to get the poor to help out a bit and pay some taxes.

Thus has inequality intruded into the stately world that Hatch inhabits.

Apparently it hasn’t dawned on Hatch and his Republican buddies that if you create a highly unequal economy eventually you will end up with a small number of people still able to pay tax, and a larger number unable to pay. There is no mystery to this. Yes, it is true that many people earning high salaries are feeling highly taxed. That comes with the territory. And, yes, those folks feel that they are carrying the entire burden of paying taxes. They are. They earn the money.

They cannot complain. At least the earn enough to pay taxes. A very large number – according to Hatch 51% of citizens – are so poorly paid that they don’t pay anything.

How can we make this easy for the Senator?

The tax burden is skewed because incomes are skewed.

The answer is not to fiddle with the tax code to spread the burden downwards so that the poor share the burden. It is to fix income inequality so that the poor have sufficient incomes to start paying taxes. We should help the poor move up. Or is that too interventionist? Or perhaps not libertarian enough? After all the poor surely choose to be poor. And we should let them be free to remain poor. Maintaining freedom is, after all, more important than dealing with poverty. Or so the Republicans argue.

If ever there was a moment that clarified how far removed the Republicans are from the consequences of their own policies this is it. They are divorced from the reality of life for the majority of Americans. They feel the pain of the upper middle class and big business as they are forced to carry the entire tax load. Instead of re-balancing the economy, the GOP reacts by seeking to tilt it even further.

That’s vicious. That’s callous. That’s anti-social. That’s a sure way to end the very dream that fools like Hatch think they are defending when they attack government intervention.

No wonder the economy can only limp along. Our leadership doesn’t understand the consequences of its own action.

Inequality intrudes and Hatch gets mad. Not at inequality. But at the poor.

Oh. One more thing.

Of course the number of people not paying tax has gone up recently. They’re unemployed. They don’t have an income to pay tax on.

Grief.

Is this really that difficult to understand?