To The Gilded-Age Mobile Batman!!!

Good times ahead for the poor...

George Will on the incoming Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dave Camp:

Many conservatives, including Camp, believe that although most Americans should be paying lower taxes, more Americans should be paying taxes. The fact that 46.7 million earners pay no income tax creates moral hazard — incentives for perverse behavior: Free-riding people have scant incentive to restrain the growth of government they are not paying for with income taxes
"I believe," Camp says, "you've got to have some responsibility for the government you have." People have co-payments under Medicare, and everyone should similarly have some "skin in the game" under the income tax system.

In addition to the one-third of the 143 million tax returns filed by individual earners for 2007 that showed no tax liability, additional millions of households have incomes low enough to exempt them from filing tax returns. The bottom two quintiles of earners have negative income tax liabilities — they receive cash payments from the government via refundable tax credits.

This is precisely America's problem--poor people simply don't share enough of the burden..... And of course, Camp is right--there is an enormous conspiracy of poor people in America who are scheming to grow government precisely because they don't pay income taxes. And here I thought we had turned back the evil hordes of slackers with welfare reform!!!

In all seriousness, people like Camp are leading the charge to return America to the Gilded Age, a time where the rich controlled all aspects of society while the poor lived like dogs, scrapping for survival, dying at early ages, suffering from disease, starvation, and all the symptoms of poverty. And while this is going on, the rich were blaming the poor for their own plight. That the stated goal of Karl Rove is to return America to late 19th century social policies should have alamred all of us a decade ago. That his goals have only gained credence within the Republican Party, including the official approval of supposedly serious Republican voice George Will, since them should make us all fight now.