Orrin Hatch Thinks The Tax System Is Unfair Because It Doesn’t Tax Poor People Enough

http://thinkprogress.org/2011/05/05/orrin-hatch-tax-poor-people/

In an effort to fend off Democratic budgetary proposals that include higher tax rates on the rich and corporations, Congressional Republicans are dusting off one of their favorite talking points: that America’s debt and deficits are caused entirely by spending and not at all by decreasing revenue streams. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made the argument on the Senate floor yesterday, saying: “We all know that raising taxes would stall the rebound we all claim to want. Let’s just admit we don’t have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, has been making the argument in a different way, pushing a recent report that 51 percent of Americans don’t pay any income taxes. To Hatch and his Republican colleagues, the report is perfect evidence that the rich already pay too much in taxes. The answer to that problem, as Hatch explained on MSNBC’s Daily Rundown today, is to revamp the tax code in order to make middle- and lower-class Americans pay their fair share:

HOST: Do you reform the tax code system? The president’s own fiscal commission came out and said that if we reform the tax code, you could save and add a trillion dollars.

HATCH: Well, Bastiat, the great economist of the past said, the place where you’ve got to get revenues has to come from the middle class. That’s the huge number of people that are there. So the system does need to be revamped. As far as, I think I made the point that if you just go with what the president says about the wealthy, you might get $36 billion compared to the $1.5 trillion expenditure this year, or should I say deficit this year. And the problem with that is that you hit about 800,000 small businesses where the jobs are created that would hopefully get enough people to pay taxes. So, yeah, we have an unbalanced tax code that we’ve got to change.

More at the link --

designed to convince middle-class people that poor people are unproductive leeches.

They forget that even people who make too little (MAKE TOO LITTLE, GET IT?) to pay income tax do pay sales tax, and if they live in an area with little or no public transit, they pay gas taxes, and if they're seniors who bought houses in the good old days, they pay property taxes.

sales taxes are levied by local and state governments (and deductible from federal taxes). Gas taxes are partially federal, but there is a large state component, and all federal gas taxes go toward roads and other transit programs. Property taxes are all local and state in nature. So, if you're talking about federal taxes, the focus should be on social security, medicare and other federal excise taxes.

don't itemize, especially if they aren't making house payments.

The standard deduction is $5700 for a single person. You have to be pretty affluent to have your sales tax deduction add up to that much. It's only a couple hundred dollars for most people.

get it yet!? They LIED to you!!!!! Are ya gonna take it? They assume you will because they have given you enough propaganda(lies)to hate the left. Hopefully some of you wake the fuck up because we need to take our country back from the billionaires.

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The rich... not so much. My uncle the unionized schoolteacher in Yonkers pays the same dollar amount to SSA and Medicare/Medicaid every year as Derek Jeter.


And I wonder how many people that make big money like Jeter are in fact corporations, and thus pay lower taxes and have more exceptions than my uncle, the actual factual PERSON, does?

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just ask the SCOTUS

earned income tax credit??? This is a reflection
on a Congress who permits Companies to pay such
low wages they cannot be taxed.

If low-income workers made close to a living wage in this
country they would pay taxes.

Stop whining Senator, You cannot have it both ways.
As long as you and your colleagues reward the Business
Company with low wage workers, they will not earn enough
to pay taxes.

How fucked up is the world right now that prominent pols on the right are explicitly taking a pro-tax-hike stance on the lower and middle class? Wasn't their great bogeyman of the past the quote-unquote TAX AND SPEND Democrat? The Liberal who wanted to raise YOUR taxes? How much you wanna bet that conservatives around the US, even poor ones and middle class ones, will think this is a great idea, simply because it's a republican promoting it?

I've really come to the conclusion, that Republicans definitely have a "brain malformation" which causes their lack of compassion and their constant and continuous psycho babble. They are Domestic Terrorists one and all, and that includes their bought and paid for right wing Supreme Court. The biggest internal threat to this country since the right wing "American Bund," the "KKK," Birchers, "Oath Keepers," "Birthers," "Tenthers," "Foxers," "Beckers," "Limbaugers," "Paliners," "Kochers," "Corporateers," and all of the right wing, phony religious types. All the lunatics in this country seem to be Republicans and they are destroying this nation. How about just water boarding the entire Republican Party and calling it a decade? After all, it's not torture, it's "enhanced interrogation techniques" lol.

Booby hatch,' for an insane asylum, may have its beginnings in the 'booby hatch,' a police wagon used to carry criminals to jail. ...but used for a time in this country, as a term for insane asylum.

Lou

Yet he is as cruel as the rest of them.