Orrin Hatch is angry that so many working people don't pay taxes because they get a "refundable tax credit." 51% work and file tax returns, but don't end up owing and Federal taxes. Hell, 23 million even get more in a refundable tax credit" than they pay in FICA taxes!
Watch Orrin get angry! He's not angry at the "truly poor" - just all those people who work but "don't have skin in the game."
So who does Orrin want to pay Federal Income taxes? He certainly doesn't want the people who live off interest and capital gains to pay more in taxes. He's angry that the working poor, and retirees receiving taxable pensions, aren't paying taxes. Why aren't they paying any taxes?
Because these qualify for the largest anti-poverty program in the country.
Orrin Hatch isn't half as angry at them as we should be about HIM and the entire Republican Party.
Hatch is referring to the people receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit. It's designed to reward work, and keep the working class out of poverty. 30 million families received it in 2010. As a matter of fact, 23 million of them qualified for such a large refund that it came to more than their FICA withholding. Yes, that is what he is complaining about in that clip. Get it? They should have all paid income taxes. He's angry that the recipients aren't completely POOR yet. Let's get rid of the EITC!
THAT is how the Republicans think that we make the system fairer. Instead of having 50% of the country where workers receive the EITC, (and thus don't end up paying Federal income taxes), we will have a country where 50% of our taxpayers are below the poverty line.
That's the country he and the Republicans want. Right now, the top 1% of our taxpayers make 25% of the annual income, and have 40% of the wealth. 40% of the wealth The next 19% - the managerial and professional classes - have 50.5% of the wealth.The bottom 80% of the wage-earners share 10% of the wealth, and he wants the bottom 50% of the wage earners to live below poverty level. That is the Republican goal.
I'm so mad I could spit. If he gets his way, his HEAD will end up on a spit. He is talking about one of the most inequitable countries in modern times. THAT is what the Republicans have done to our nation in thirty years' time - our nation, which once had the richest middle-class in the world, the envy of all other nations.
The Republicans want an aristocracy, not a democracy. They are traitors to everything our forefathers fought and worked and died for. They deserve to be drummed out of government and their party's name never spoken again, unless with curses.. That's where all my outrage is directed today.
Our nation cannot afford to have the Republican Party win any house of Congress or the Presidency in 2012. Whatever it takes to defeat them and put a Progressive Congress in place, we must strive with our full strength to accomplish. If you ever believed in the power of people to defeat money and media, you must believe in it and work for it now.
To do anything otherwise is literally to doom millions of your fellow citizens to death, death by the class warfare weapons of desperate poverty, untreated disease and crime. The Republicans want to eliminate the poorest of us with those weapons. They will if they win, because Orrin Hatch just told you today what their version of a "fair" system is.