The GOP candidates have been eager to talk about and bash the 47% of Americans who don't pay federal taxes, but what you won't hear Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Perry, Rand, Romney, or Santorum tell you is that the majority of these "nontaxpayers" are from red states.
The conservative candidates won't talk about that fact because it's too embarrassing for them to acknowledge that most of the people too poor to qualify for paying federal taxes are from states with GOP governors and that traditionally vote Republican.
This is just another example of the dishonesty rampant in the GOP campaign for the presidential nomination. We've already seen Romney's blatantly dishonest video where he attributes John McCain's words to President Obama; we've heard Michele Bachmann falsely claim she's made no gaffes during her quest for the nomination; and Newt Gingrich wants people to believe that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac gave him almost $2 million to advise them as an historian.
From Andrew Sullivan's blog:
"Ramesh Ponnuru chides the GOP for indulging in reverse class warfare, pitting the 53 percent against the 47 percent of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes. He debunks the "freeloader myth":
"That 47 percent of all tax filers have no income-tax liability is now one of the most widely known statistics on the right. (Actually, according to the Tax Policy Center, the figure was 47 percent in 2009 and will be 46 percent for this tax year, but 47 is the number that has lingered in the public debate.) Economist Michael Boskin, a veteran of Republican administrations, fretted in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that tax policy “can create a majority paying nothing and voting more spending at the expense of a taxpaying minority.” When he announced his presidential campaign, Texas governor Rick Perry said, “We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax.” Michele Bachmann, also running for the Republican nomination, says she will reform taxes so that everyone pays some amount in income taxes.
Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin echoes this concern. “We’re coming close to a tipping point in America where we might have a net majority of takers versus makers in society and that could become very dangerous if it sets in as a permanent condition,” he said in a recent speech to the Heritage Foundation.
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The ten states with the highest number of non-payers are a strongly Republican bunch: Eight of them went for John McCain in 2008, and nine of them have Republican governors. Keith Hennessey, an economic adviser in George W. Bush’s administration, notes that the historical data suggest that the child credit was the main reason for the increase in the number of non-payers between 1995 and 2007."
The next time you hear conservatives whining about Americans who don't pay any federal income taxes, tell them to take their complaints to the GOP governors of the GOP states. That's where you'll find the Americans who are causing them this fake conservative angst.
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