Do we need still another reason to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans? Fresh moral support for higher levies on the top bracket arrived today from the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which reports that charitable giving among the rich fell during the Great Recession – yet rose simultaneously among the poor, middle class, and working families that had much less to give.
It is a remarkable set of statistics, drawn from IRS data, which ought to shame every fat-cat who ever complained about the “47 percent,” or the “takers.” According to the Chronicle, those who earned more than $200,000 annually gave an average of 4.6 percent less between 2006 and 2012, while those who earned less than $100,000 gave an average of 4.5 percent more during that same period. (Because the rich were taking home a much greater share of national income during those years, however, the total amount they donated to charity nevertheless increased by $4.6 billion.)
And the very poorest Americans – from households that earned $25,000 or less per year – actually increased their giving by almost 17 percent.
Chronicle editor Stacy Palmer says that the economic downturn “was a shock” to the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers, who are “nervous and cautious” in their giving. By contrast, poor and working people, living only a step or two away from destitution, reached deeper into their pockets to help friends and neighbors whose troubles they witness every day.
Instead of hoping that the rich will provide charitable assistance where needed, we should tax them a bit more and avoid future cuts to food stamps, unemployment insurance, and other vital programs. (A 4 percent hike in the top rate sounds just right.) Meanwhile, the self-righteous swells can cease lecturing about the deficient character of the supposed takers – who are clearly the most virtuous and compassionate members of society.
When the “family values”-loving Mark Sanford (R-SC) won back his former seat in the House of Representatives after lying to his constituents, betraying his wife and then trespassing on that now-ex-wife’s home, many observers reminded us that evangelical Christians love a redemption narrative.
A core part of the fiery breed of God-fearingness shared by many on the far right is a belief in a “repentance for sin, being able to start anew, start afresh,” said Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.
And as we debate whether now-New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner — who never actually left his wife — will be forgiven by Big Apple voters the way Mark Sanford was forgiven by South Carolina’s 1st district, we often forget to include in the discussion American’s foremost forgiven sinner — a man who cast aside all aspersions of scandal and continues to serve in the Senate as if he had never besmirched his own name: David Vitter (R-LA).
In 2007, Vitter — a leading advocate of banning same-sex marriage and opening public meetings with prayers — admitted that he was a client of D.C. Madam Deborah Jeane Palfre. But he denied — nay, rebutted! — allegations that he’d also visited prostitutes in New Orleans. Then he said he was going to continue doing his important work in the Senate, despite the fact that much of America now knew that this law-breaking, cheating husband probably had a diaper fetish.
Vitter was easily re-elected in 2010 after running a campaign typified by what may be the most blatantly racist ad ever run by a member of the U.S. Congress:
(Who would dare welcome and feed the brown-skinned poor? You could get crucified for that.)
But this week, Vitter revealed his real fetish with an amendment to this year’s farm bill that would ban certain convicts from SNAP, aka food-stamp benefits, for life. As David Dayen points out, “Cannily, the crime of soliciting prostitutes is exempted from this ban.”
LOL.
Targeting violent felons with lifelong punishment is the kind of thing no politician can vote against without fearing an ad that screams, “MARK PRYOR VOTED TO GIVE CONVICTED PEDOPHILE RAPIST MURDERERS FOOD STAMPS!”
“Some people say these are unsavory crimes, and I agree,” said Bob Greenstein, founder and president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Dayen. “But there’s a broader principle here. Suppose you did something terrible when you were 19, and you were straight the rest of your life, you paid your debt to society, now you’re 82 and living in poverty, should you be stripped of food stamps? Is this the right thing to do?”
“It doesn’t save anyone any money,” Timothy Smeeding, director of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty, told MSNBC. “It just makes sort of a political statement that we don’t forgive people for crimes once they pay their dues. We’re just going to punish them forever.”
Forget about the idiocy of encouraging recidivism by forcing those who already have little chance of finding work to starve. What about redemption? Forgiveness?
Starting afresh!
Vitter’s amendment — which was unanimously accepted by the Senate — would punish both the ex-convicts and their families for the rest of their lives. And who would be most likely to be afflicted by such a law?
Here we get to the core of Vitter’s perversion. There’s only one sin those on the far right cannot forgive you for: being born poor.
The hostility to “food stamps,” the fictional “Obamaphone” — which Vitter also filed an amendment against — and Medicaid expansion all have one thing in common: the belief that “the poor” are ripping us off, bankrupting this country and would be better off if the government gave them nothing.
To believe this, you not only have to disregard much of what Jesus actually taught, but you have to ignore the sad fact that the best predictor of a child’s success in school is his or her parents’ wealth and education. You also have ignore the untold billions taxpayers spend subsidizing the richest, who argue with straight faces that capping IRAs at $3 million will somehow discourage saving.
Riddle me this: why is “propensity to quote New Testament” positively correlated with “advocating anti-poor policies?”
The war on the poor or “excess Americans” — as the creator of The Wire David Simon calls them — is as sickening as it is convenient.
“We do not need 10-12 percent of our population; they’ve been abandoned,” Simon recently said. “They don’t have barbed wire around them, but they might as well.”
They can be abandoned, punished for life, encouraged to recommit acts that drive them back to prison, where they can actually make some money for a private corporation. But they cannot be forgiven. That right, that sacrament, is reserved for those who wear suits and ties during the day and diapers in the evening.
From the Tea Parties to the corporate boardrooms to the presidential debate platforms, we hear a familiar droning whine about taxes — except the angry message is no longer simply that taxes are too high. Today, conservative politicians and pundits complain instead that some people, namely those too poor to owe federal income taxes, aren’t paying enough. So what if those people can scarcely sustain their families, like the millions of middle-class families doing slightly better but struggling as well?
This is the Democratic “fairness” argument turned upside down, which may prove to have limited appeal. What will appeal to most Americans even less are the proposed Republican solutions, like a national sales tax. And what might surprise them is that the first president to expand tax relief for the working poor was that almighty Republican icon, Ronald Reagan, whose name is constantly invoked by politicians unworthy of his legacy.
However piously they cite the Gipper as their idol, the Republican candidates for president seem united in their desire to repeal the Earned Income Tax Credit, which he justly praised in 1986 as “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.” Now Republican politicians increasingly reject the earned income credit as an immoral form of “welfare,” because its provisions have helped to insure that roughly 47 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax, with the poorest receiving a modest rebate instead. That statistic has been distorted all too often into the false assertion, usually uttered on Fox News Channel or right-wing talk radio, that the poorer half of the nation’s population “pays no taxes.”
Of course the working poor pay lots of taxes. In fact they tend to pay more as a share of their income than the very rich, plenty of whom do not work at all. The poor pay state and local income tax as well as sales taxes, gas taxes, and utility taxes, but above all they pay Social Security and Medicare taxes on the very first dollar of income they earn (and on every dollar up to the $106,000 ceiling that shelters the income of higher earners). To suggest that the working poor receive government benefits without paying anything is a brazen lie.
Aside from the earned income credit, there is another very basic reason why the working poor don’t pay income taxes. After decades of falling wages and rising inequality, they literally cannot afford it. As the noted economics reporter David Cay Johnston explained last April 15, the average annual income among the bottom half of American taxpayers was around $15,000. With the first $9350 exempt from federal income tax for single people, a figure that rises to $18,700 for married couples, millions of households don’t earn enough to owe anything to the IRS. At the same time, Johnston pointed out that many of the wealthiest families in the country also pay no taxes thanks to loopholes such as the “carried interest” provision, which Republicans fight ferociously to preserve against “socialist” demands that bankers and investors pay the same rate as their secretaries and janitors.
Although polls show that most Americans — including most Republican voters — strongly favor raising rates on the wealthiest taxpayers, the GOP leadership is sworn to prevent any such reform. Rather than close the grossest loopholes and deductions exploited by billionaires, Republican politicians want to punish all those families living large on $300 a week (and their children) by taxing them more. One way to do that, favored by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and presidential candidate Herman Cain, among others, is to impose a national sales tax or value-added tax. The result, as any tax expert could explain, would shift the national tax burden even further from the wealthy to the working poor and middle class. It is their form of class warfare. And unless the rates were much higher than proposed in Cain’s “9-9-9” plan or Ryan’s original budget, a sales tax would increase deficits and debt instead of reducing them.
Why millionaires like Ryan and Cain favor such schemes is obvious enough. What is far less obvious is why they can still pretend that they revere Reagan — or that they want to cut taxes for anybody except themselves.
