I’m a pretty ordinary, mild-mannered workaday journalist, but if I do have a superpower, it’s quoting the Bible back to religious conservatives to prove that their policy prescriptions are pretty clearly not what Jesus would do. (For that, I can thank 11 years of Catholic schooling, though I sometimes tell people that I suddenly developed this ability one day after being bitten by a radioactive nun.)
Recently, Congress and President Obama took our economy to the brink of disaster during a protracted debt-ceiling negotiation in which Republicans refused to bend to the president’s demands (and by “demands,” I mean “obsequious pleas phrased in the form of a bland assertion”) that the Bush upper-class tax cuts be rolled back in order to help lower the deficit.
Republicans refused. Tax hikes were “off the table,” said House Speaker John Boehner. What kind of crazy fool destroys the business environment by raising taxes during a recession? The president is out of his mind. And a Muslim. And while he is a native of this country, we’re pretty sure he was hatched from a puffin egg, and thus not constitutionally eligible to be president.
Oh, what a difference a couple of weeks and a few billion dollars in assets make.
Turns out that there is a kind of tax that many in the GOP don’t mind raising – payroll taxes.
President Obama has proposed extending a payroll tax decrease that was enacted at the beginning of this year and that’s set to expire on Jan. 1, but many Republicans in Congress are balking.
Here’s a brief summary of this roiling controversy, from a recent AP story:
“Many of the same Republicans who fought hammer-and-tong to keep the George W. Bush-era income tax cuts from expiring on schedule are now saying a different ‘temporary’ tax cut should end as planned. By their own definition, that amounts to a tax increase.
“The tax break extension they oppose is sought by President Barack Obama. Unlike proposed changes in the income tax, this policy helps the 46 percent of all Americans who owe no federal income taxes but who pay a ‘payroll tax’ on practically every dime they earn.”
So proposing modest tax increases on millionaires and billionaires is what’s known as “class warfare.” Proposing tax increases on pretty much everyone else is “responsible deficit reduction.”
Of course, it doesn’t end there. As I noted two weeks ago on this site, GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann – a black-hole-dense singularity of crazy from which linear thought cannot escape – wants to completely do away with capital gains and estate taxes, meaning those who inherit stocks and see their holdings skyrocket would pay exactly nothing. But the loony bus does not necessarily make all the scheduled stops on the Bachmann campaign trail. There’s more. And it only gets better.
In addition to taking millionaires and billionaires off the tax rolls, Bachmann wants to make sure those Americans who supposedly pay no taxes are chipping in. In the same interview in which she proposed zeroing out capital gains taxes and the “death tax,” she proposed raising taxes on the bottom tiers of wage earners, noting that “everyone should have to pay something.” (Unfortunately, this is not just Bachmann’s quirk: The Wall Street Journal recently called this line of thinking “the new Republican orthodoxy.”)
Of course, the reason some Americans are not paying income taxes is because they’re making very little income – or they’re making nothing. And, of course, they are paying taxes – if they buy anything during the course of the year, or receive a paycheck. And the taxes people in the bottom 10%, 20%, 30%, etc., of wage earners pay are likely more of a hardship than the – admittedly huge – tax bills Warren Buffett and Bill Gates pay. The mega-rich, as Buffett calls people like himself, do pay far more in taxes than the average person, but does it really make sense to tax the poor and middle class more heavily to close the gap? Is that really what Jesus would do?
We currently live in an America where the poor are victimizing the rich, gay people are agitating for “special” rights, and straight white men can’t catch a break.
I’m fully expecting Michele Bachmann to accuse broiler hens of persecuting chicken farmers by wrecking the bars of their battery cages with their unnaturally huge, genetically engineered girth.
Please, please, please, Michele, I desperately want you to campaign on the idea that the wealthy pay too much in capital gains and inheritance taxes while the poor skate by with their measly payroll, sales, and gas tax obligations. I dare you. But first, I think you should consult your Bible.
And now, my superpower unleashed. Shazam!
“And Jesus sat over against the treasury, and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in much. And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing. And he called unto him his disciples, and saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury: For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living.” – Mark 12:41-44
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