WSJ Editorial Brings Out the Fantasy of Conservatism – Not Cutting Taxes for the Ultra Wealthy Hurts the Middle Class

And They Don’t Even Know Who the Middle Class Is

Consider these paragraphs from the WSJ Editorial on the Senate deliberations(?) on the health care bill/tax cut for the rich back in the summer..

On the dishonest left and the timid right, the Senate health-care bill boils down to “benefit cuts for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich.” Some centrist Republicans are spooked and want their colleagues to keep ObamaCare’s enormous tax increase on investment income. The pity is that the losers of this political retreat would be American workers with stagnant wages.

ObamaCare created a 3.8-percentage-point surtax on capital gains, dividends, interest and other forms of so-called “unearned income.” This tax increase on capital was sold as hitting the rich, but note that it brought the top rate to 23.8% for singles earning as little as $200,000 and couples $250,000. That’s a middle-class couple. Democrats are weaponizing the income-distribution tables as they always do, because most of the $172.2 billion in lost revenue over a decade on a static basis would flow to the top 20% of taxpayers.

Note that concern is that workers would be the ones to suffer, exactly how that happens is of course the old discarded trickle down bull.  And notice in the first paragraph the tax is described as ‘enormous’ while in the second paragraph we learn it is $172 billion over ten years, or $17 billion a year compared to a $4+ trillion federal budget.  And finally notice that even the WSJ acknowledges that most of the money goes to the top 20% (actually most of it goes to the very top of the income distribution).  Who does the mney help?  Oh, low income people, it helps them get health care and health insurance.  Who would want that?

And look at what they think of as a middle class couple.  Their thinking, if one could call it that, is a couple making $250,000 a year.  Wow, what alternate universe do they live in?  Just to bring some facts into the discussion the Census Bureau says that for 2015 the top 5%  in family income in the nation had incomes of $215,00 and above.  That top 5% has 22% of the total income in the U. S.  And to get to actually pay that top rate the couple has to make more than $250,000 a year.

So no, we are not talking about the middle class here.  We are talking about the very high income folks.   But of course the real sin here as far as conservatives are concerned is that the tax is on the rich.  After all in their minds the role of government is to protect and help the most wealthy of citizens.