What's Good For The 1% Is Good For The Gander

Slow On The Uptake 

While hanging out in bed this morning somewhere between sleep and wakefulness,  I started thinking about payroll taxes of all things.  Do you remember that as part of the stimulus to get the economy rolling again, payroll taxes were lowered by a full two percentage points and totally forgiven for people, like my sister and brother-in-law, who were bringing in a certain amount of income or less.  Conservatives didn't like the plan.  It coddled people and made them dependent on an ever-expanding government.  At their first chance, Congress reinstated the earlier tax rate in the name of, I guess, fairness.

So I started thinking about that attitude, the attitude that says forgiving my barely-making-ends-meet brother-in-law the pittance of payroll taxes (6.5% of his meagre income) he pays would somehow hurt him and the country.  Back in the 80's Reagan and Tip O'Neal (sp?) agreed to raise the rate of the payroll tax to the current 6.5% in an effort to restore long-term solvency to Social Security.  The rate went up and, if Reagan and Alan Greenspan had in fact put that extra money into the SS Trust Fund instead of using it to defray the unsustainable cost of Reagan's popular (to the wealthy) tax cuts, Social Security would be on pretty firm footing even as we speak.  But they didn't do that.  Not only didn't they do that, but the 6.5% payroll tax only applied to an individual's first $110,000 of earnings (payroll taxes going to Medicare were set at something like 1.4% and applied to all income).

If that's the case (and it is), I couldn't help but think about the hypocrisy of all those folks (read:Mitt Romney and the rest of the 1%) who were screaming doom and gloom over letting people like my brother-in-law off the payroll tax hook.  Romney famously talked about creators and takers.  The takers were all those people who were living off the largesse of the federal government without paying their fair share in taxes.  These takers were being turned into dependent free-loaders by profligate Democrats.  Insert as many GASPS here as you would like.

But what about people like Romney and Ryan and Coburn and Boehner and Limbaugh and Hannity, etc.?  I suspect Romney's income is above $110,000.  Let's be conservative and say he pulls down $500,000 in salary from Bain, or whoever.  That means he earns $400,00 free of payroll tax.  Doesn't that governmental break turn him into a dependent taker just like the break for my brother-in-law made him a taker.  And what if Romney invests a couple of million in a mutual fund like Berkshire Hathaway and gains 10% in value over a year?  Does he have to pay any payroll taxes on that?  The answer is no.

I know I am a wild-eyed liberal, but there seems to be a fundamental unfairness here.  It seems like we believe (rather our Congress comprised of wealthy white guys believes) that eliminating the taxes of the poor makes them dependent takers and hurts our country; on the other hand, eliminating the taxes of the wealthy creates jobs and makes our country great.  After all what's good for the 1% is good for the country.  I would have to take exception here.  The truth is that what is good for the 1% is good for the 1%, country be damned.