President Obama has now thrown down the gauntlet to Congress on taxes, arguing — and campaigning — that on the issue of tax burden fairness, “millionaires and billionaires” should pay more income tax. If the president truly seeks equity in income tax policy, he should propose that all Americans pay “something” in order to be part of the income tax-paying public.
According to the Tax Policy Center, 76 million tax filers (46 percent of all tax filers) will pay no income tax in 2011. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent of all taxpayers pays 40 percent of all income taxes. So 54 percent of all tax filers are “carrying” the 46 percent who pay nothing. That’s fundamentally unfair and has led over time to inequities and a dependency on government that is unhealthy for a free society.
Forced dependency ultimately breeds contempt, and even as Americans subject to reliance on benevolent government programs are grateful for a “safety net,” eventually that gratitude can yield to resentment. Then resentment can yield to anger at those responsible for dependency programs in spite of the good intentions of social policy advocates. Psychologists will even tell us that it helps an individual’s self-worth to be free — to have control over one’s destiny, no matter how small that morsel of freedom is.
Arguably, social policy imposed with good intentions to help those in need in America — the truly poor and otherwise disadvantaged — has created a growing culture of Americans who’ve benefited but also suffered from such dependency. Too many Americans became dependent on government programs starting with the Great Depression (the one in the 1930s); many have remained dependent ever since. Government housing programs that “warehoused” poor Americans in many big cities since the 1960s put a roof over their heads, but created a culture of angry residents and unsafe neighborhoods throughout urban America that remain today — largely in squalor.
But that’s what benevolent governments and liberal policymakers often do — spend federal money creating programs fostering inescapable dependency on government that consigns good and creative people to a life of reliance on government and programs that imprison them with little opportunity to break free. Of the trillions in taxpayer dollars that government has invested in the poor, one would expect ample evidence of progress to release the poor from government dependency and lives of poverty. Sadly, poverty levels of 12 percent in 1969 have grown to 15.1 percent today, hardly a ringing endorsement for the government’s ability to free citizens to “pursue happiness.” Besides, being in poverty is demeaning.
One way to instill pride in spite of dependency is to be a contributor to a better America, pride that policymakers should encourage in today’s culture of joblessness and global economic uncertainty. I recall in the 1990s examples presented during Congressional debates over welfare reform; some Americans were actually proud to file an income tax return for the first time. Doing so meant that the single mother struggling to survive had finally broken free of well-meaning government dependency. It was her own prideful declaration of independence.
As Congress and the president butt heads over whether or not to raise taxes in a down economy, and government assistance programs feel the pressure of America’s $14 trillion debt, it’s time for our leaders to conclude that not just the “rich,” but all Americans should share in the cost of government. Each of us should have some skin in the game of setting a future course for American prosperity and sharing the burden of an outrageous national debt.
When more Americans are riding in the wagon than Americans pulling the wagon, resentment builds against the passengers. That’s why the 76 million tax filers who pay no income tax should pay something to ease the collective tax burden and make a fair contribution, allowing them to join the ranks of those “pulling the wagon.” While forcing a commitment of those who use the same government services that taxpayers do to pay the “fair share” that Obama keeps stressing, more taxpayers will make the burden lighter for all.
Let’s face it, even the poor have some disposable income; with over 300 million cell phones in circulation today, almost everyone has one. Over 99 percent of all American households have at least one television set; cable television brags at over 56 million subscribers. Try driving through any neighborhood in the United States today at dusk. If you glance at apartments or houses there, you’ll see a television turned on in almost every household, likely hooked up to a cable system. Cigarettes sold worldwide number over 5.5 trillion per year; over 20 percent of Americans currently smoke.
Americans who smoke, own a television, or a cell phone can probably afford to pay — pick a minimum number, like $100 per year — and become an income tax payer in order to share the burden of government and be more entitled to have a say in public policy matters and American society. Just call those earning little income but paying the mandatory $100 very good citizens, contributing what they can for the common good, so that the 76 million who pay nothing will join the ranks of those who pay something. Then all income taxpayers will have a financial stake in a better America.
Perhaps it’s time for policymakers, joined by all who currently pay income taxes, to thoughtfully adopt the corollary of the Founding Fathers’ famous cry for justice, and declare, “no representation without taxation.”
George Nethercutt is the former congressman representing the 5th District of Washington. His column appears here once a month.
I think Mr. Nethercutt might make a valid point from his own perspective of apparently not being (or feeling) dependent upon his pension from his time served in Congress, courtesy of the benificence of those same taxpayers he mentions as somehow shirking their duty to contribute to his financial well being as well as their own and others´.
He does not, however, make a valid point about all of us on what is so disparagingly referred to in this modern age as welfare, in spite of the Founders stated purpose in the Preamble to the Constitution to "promote the general Welfare,..." (Depends upon who´s welfare they wanted to promote, I suppose.)
Me? I´ve been dependent upon some form of local, state, and/or federal or federally-backed government loan program for some sixteen years now -- not coincidentally connected to my divorce from a 28-year marriage in 1995, and my inability to return to the paid work force after fourteen years as a mother and home manager, and living on my scant Social Security income alone. And I can honestly say, I have not one whit of contempt for, resentment towards, or "anger at those responsible for dependency programs."
Indeed, I´m so grateful to those responsible for those dependency programs that I pray fervently each night for their own well being, financial and otherwise, their continuance in their elective offices, and their jobs with the agencies that provide those benefits. In fact, the more paper they push, the better off I feel when my head hits the pillow at night under the leak-free roof that covers my head, and I always add a P.S. to God to bless Congress and the President, whatever their individual political affiliation.
And you can bet I´ll pray even harder for them when I see them convened en masse on the steps of the Capitol Building "twinkling" to us all come election time, as all of US WOOFS do, rather than applaud our good fortunes and those who speak out for what they believe in the hallowed halls of Congress. [Some of us join only symbolically, you see, the Wall Street and Other Occupational Forces (WOOFs)] in our lack of transportation and money to join protests and sit-ins because we can´t afford to even own a car to get to the polls to vote.
All of which brings me to remembering "...the policymakers, joined by all who currently pay income taxes, to thoughtfully adopt the corollary of the Founding Fathers’ famous cry for justice, and declare, “no representation without taxation.” Indeed, those policy makers have been so generous to me I even have a small savings account.
So I can save $100 per year to pay taxes, since I bought the cheaper-per-month Metro PCS "luxurious" cell phone rather than a install a land line for a rented phone through higher-cost AT&T when I moved here to Euless in January to be near my son who takes me grocery-shopping each week. I can even afford to buy a birthday card for my brother, Fljoyd, who pays for the cable t.v. and internet service I can´t afford any more than I can afford a car to get to the grocery store, much less to the polls to vote.
Which brings me to the importance of family values, marriages which last more than the proverbial seven-year-itch, and the necessity for family-wage jobs to provide for those families, as well as passing a law that requires the primary bread winner in a family to pay into Social Security for the primary caregiver in the absence of a job for the latter which pays enough to provide day care for the children, a primary cook and bottle-washer, extra clothes for work, and a car for transportation in cities that are not blessed with the "luxury" of a decent bus system.
There now, that´s more good writing therapy than I´ve had since I wrote to my Congressman for four-and-a-half years. And without paying any taxes at all. (I´ll start saving this coming month for the proposed tax-initiative Mr. Nethercutt intends to sponsor in his next run for Congress. That ought to be a more important bill than "The Twinkling Dream Act of 2012" and might even be a selling point for Governor Rick Perry´s campaign in support of in-state tuition for the children of illegal immigrants. Oct 13, 2011 | Reply to this comment
George, we all already do.
What you´re saying here is just disgusting--that those who don´t currently pay an income tax don´t deserve to be viewed the same as those who do. That´s your class warfare, right there. Oct 16, 2011 | Reply to this comment
Rain, while I haven´t checked out the Tax Policy Center´s sources of statistics or projections, I don´t believe all poor citizens DO pay taxes, as you so blithely assert as fact.
But I do know that I felt much better when I found a job at 62 years old selling classified ads for a local newspaper after many years of unemployment, and could pay off an old credit-card debt, and had paid enough in taxes to get a refund. (In fact, when the newspaper closed down, and I lost that job and income early into the next year, I didn´t even file a return for that year because I was receiving government-funded rental assistance and felt I owed the government all the money that was deducted.)
I do also think you´re missing the point of George´s comment and forgetting the quite pertinent quote of his that I opened with - it is a FACT (not "disgusting" sentiment) that taxpayers DO begin to view those on welfare as passengers, rather than load-pullers.
That´s not class warfare, that´s reality, and I´ll bet your ship´s already come in, and you´re not missing the "Sugar Boat" that the old Mills Brothers sang about in the song from the forties right on into the nineties in my living room, even as I write. If you were, I doubt you´d be singing the liberal-leaning song you´re singing now about George´s "disgusting class warfare". Oct 17, 2011 | Reply to this comment
I hate to break it to you but if you had a job you paid taxes. Even though you didn´t pay federal income taxes, you paid payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare). In fact, in Washington State even if you don´t have a job you´re still being hit by a sales tax.
George is way off here. I think it is disgusting to ask someone making less $10,890 a year (that is the 2011 poverty level for a single person) to be taxed at a higher rate. Oct 17, 2011 | Reply to this comment
You likely didn´t read my comments, however, for if you did, you´d realize that I never said I didn´t pay taxes when I held a job at just about that poverty level you mention. I only paid taxes when I was employed, not unemployed, and I did, of course, pay income tax, as well as Social Security and Medicare taxes, though not at the higher rate that George used ($100.00) as his "minimal" amount. (I was actually taxed $476.00 in income taxes, plus another $904.29 in Social Security and Medicare.)
Granted, he could have been referring to income and payroll taxes combined, though he started out mentioning only income taxes. Assuming the former, of course, I can easily calculate that my near-poverty-level wages were taxed at about an 11.5% rate, so his $100.00 "minimal" figure is actually lower than what I was actually taxed, taking both into consideration. Depends upon what you consider "minimal" I suppose, at any income level, not to mention "disgusting" - penurious, maybe, but surely not disgusting.
As it happens, I also pay out of my rather low Social Security income the payment for the Sallie Mae loans I incurred in my desperate attempt to get a college degree after a divorce just before the Republican Revolution nof 1994, thinking that might work to put me back in the business workforce, what with 18 prior years of experience in said business to boot. Didn´t happen, try as I might. Only short-term temp jobs with other temporary typists and data entry operators who were telling me that "(I) work(ed) too fast for them."
Besides, Sallie Mae (a.k.a. "Big Government") needs it more than the banks that held my defaulted credit card debt do, and the latter, as well, were only too happy to give me four of them with (to me) almost-unlimited credit limits without question after my divorce, even listing "Unemployed" quite honestly on their four-line applications. They still do, I just manage it better than I could when I was unemployed, instead of retired with assistance from HUD.
(Thanx for more writing therapy. Just as good as writing to Congress for four-and-a-half years. They come in handy, though, when there are real problems to voice my concerns about, such as those the Occupiers want them to deal with, such as "The Twinkling Dream Act of 1012" .) Oct 17, 2011 | Reply to this comment