from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:
Have Average Taxpayers Become Freeloaders?
Opponents of the proposal for a 5.4 percent health care reform surtax on America’s wealthy are getting desperate. They've even turned their fire onto middle-income Americans.July 27, 2009
By Sam Pizzigati
Friends and fans of privilege have been striking their indignant pose the last two weeks. They’re shocked, simply shocked, that House Democratic leaders would dare advance a health care reform plan that sets a 5.4 percent surtax on households making over $1 million a year.
Affluent Americans, flacks for grand fortune are fuming, already pay the bulk of the nation’s income taxes. They'll pay virtually all of it, these critics charge, if the surtax becomes law and Congress lets the George W. Bush tax cuts for the comfortable expire, as scheduled, after 2010.
Amid all this, the most indignant of fortune’s defenders now seem to believe, average Americans have become irresponsible freeloaders, ever eager, as conservative columnist Caroline Baum puts it, to “encourage their elected representatives to vote ‘yes’ on every new benefit that comes down the pike.”
Fulminates David Harsanyi, a Denver Post columnist outraged by the health surtax notion: “President Barack Obama once promised to spread the wealth. How about spreading the responsibility, as well? Let the everyday citizen feel the cost of these gazillion-dollar legislative miracles.”
In reality, of course, everyday American citizens are pulling their weight and then some. They actually pay a higher share of their incomes in taxes — total taxes, not just federal income tax — than super rich Americans. ..........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew_2009/july27a.html