Mitt Romney’s complaint that nearly half of us are untaxed government dependents, poisoning the country with an “entitlement” mentality, is the strangest yet to emerge from the twisted moral universe of America’s most government-dependent class, the financial elite.
Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs.
As my colleague David Callahan noted in an earlier post, most of the people who don’t pay federal income taxes are either elderly, unemployed, in school, disabled, or earning too little to owe income taxes after taking their allowable tax deductions. Not everyone in America is a healthy, out-of-school, working-age person with a job, and surely low-earners no less than higher-earners are smart to take advantage of the deductions and credits legally available to them — breaks that the GOP once supported. As the New York Times noted yesterday
For a long time, cutting taxes for the poor was a major emphasis of the Republican Party. One reason that many poor people no longer pay federal income taxes is that they qualify for credits such as the earned-income tax credit, which has its roots in conservative thinking and has long been supported by members of both parties as a way to help the poor without increasing welfare payments or raising the minimum wage.
