Yeah, it's a Salon Premium article (again), but it's a good take-down of one of this season's most ridiculous arguments yet: the poor and middle class don't pay enough taxes. The argument, first floated in last month's Wall Street Journal, was so widely ridiculed that the Journal doesn't even keep the column online in its free "OpinionJournal.com" site. The idea is that since people who earn under $12,000 a year pay only 4% of their income in taxes, they get to benefit from evil "big government" programs but don't have to pay for them. They won't see how evil such programs are until they bear their "fair share," so these "lucky duckies" need to pay more taxes.

Farhad Manjoo of Salon (formerly of Wired) does a good job of pointing out the ridiculousness of this argument. First, when you include payroll taxes, the US tax system is only mildly progressive and poor people pay a lot more than 4% of their income in taxes -- one reason that some conservatives are now outlandishly claiming that the payroll tax is not really a tax. (It's just money you have to pay to the government whether you want to or not.) Second, "the poor don't pay enough in taxes" is really just the other side of "the rich pay too much in taxes" combined with the current administration's distaste for shrinking the size of government, the traditional reason the right wants to reduce federal income. It's laying the groundwork to eliminate the progressive tax altogether.

Third, as these tax-the-poor advocates don't want to point out, the rich pay more in taxes now because they've gotten so much richer in the past 20 years than any other part of US society. It's truly class warfare when not only do the rich get richer, they want the poor to pay for the services they use that helped make them rich. Incredible, and worth reading -- this could become a rallying cry like protecting millionares from the Estate Tax became the "death tax."

It looks like Dan Piraro has the right idea in this cartoon: