Rep. Bachmann Announces Support For Raising Taxes ... On The Poor And Middle-Class

House Tea Party Caucus founder Rep. Michele Bachmann explicitly voiced what many conservatives only mutter under their breath.

She's for raising taxes ... just only on the poor and the middle-class.

When asked by ABC's George Stephanopoulos about the latest poll showing huge support for raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, Bachmann made repeated excuses for keeping taxes low on CEOs and billionaires, then bluntly stated the poor and the middle-class should pay more in taxes.

REP. MICHELE BACHMANN: If we taxed 100 percent of what everyone made who make $250,000 or more -- everything they made -- that would get us about six months worth of revenue.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: But every bit helps, doesn't it?

REP. BACHMANN: Well, but it wouldn't be enough. I think that's what's shocking.

We could take 100 percent of the profits of every Fortune 500 company and that would give us 40 days worth of revenue. We could also take 100 percent of everything that the billionaires in this country own, and that wouldn't be enough to solve the problem.

So it's really a matter of having everyone involved. Part of the problem, George, is that 47 percent of all Americans pay virtually no federal income tax, so we need to broaden the base.

It's very possible all the numbers she's cited are technically true. They are just either completely devoid of context, or she is missing the context that's staring her in the face.

First, no one is seriously arguing that we could solve the entire deficit problem only by taxing the wealthy more. (The one point of consensus on the left and right is that health care costs are the main driver of our long-range deficits.) But obviously, raising taxes on those with gobs of disposable income would help reduce the deficit without inflicting economic pain.

But even her ridiculous hypotheticals don't prove her point that taxing the wealthy is futile. If taxing everything the wealthy earned for an entire year would fund half of the entire government for that year, that's a lot!

If all the annual profits of just 500 companies would fund the entire government for more than a month, that's a lot too!

Back in the realm of reality, the cost of extending the Bush income tax cuts for the wealthy over this year and next is $81.5 billion. And the extended tax cut for heirs and heiresses costs another $68 billion. That amounts to $75 billion per year.

Plus, Citizens for Tax Justice proposed closing a series of corporate tax loopholes -- without lowering their overall tax rates -- that would bring in another $90 billion per year. Closing the hedge fund manager tax loophole, according to the Economic Policy Institute, would collect another $6 billion.

All together, those proposals would add $171 billion to our nation's coffers. Sure, not enough to immediately close the entire budget deficit. But it's far more than a drop in the bucket.

Furthermore, an immediate end to budget deficits isn't even a desired goal in weak economic times. We want our government to pump more into the economy right now to stimulate economic demand and create jobs. But if we can have a smaller deficit without harming the economy by raising taxes on those who can easily afford it, it will make our long-range fiscal problems easier to solve.

Rep. Bachmann has a different idea to cut the deficit, which she shared on ABC today. Raise taxes on those who can't afford it during a weak economy.

She flatly called to "broaden the tax base" by imposing new taxes on the "47 percent of all Americans [who] pay virtually no income tax."

Her description of those middle-class and impoverished Americans may be technically true. But not paying federal "income" taxes is not the same as getting a free ride and paying no taxes at all. In reality, only 10% of households end up paying nothing in federal taxes, meaning the tax base is plenty broad.

New York Times' David Leonhardt debunked the perception of mass free-riding, continually perpetrated by conservatives, last year:

Income taxes aren’t the only kind of federal taxes that people pay. There are also payroll taxes and investment taxes, among others. And, of course, people pay state and local taxes, too.

Even if the discussion is restricted to federal taxes (for which the statistics are better), a vast majority of households end up paying federal taxes. Congressional Budget Office data suggests that, at most, about 10 percent of all households pay no net federal taxes. The number 10 is obviously a lot smaller than 47.

The reason is that poor families generally pay more in payroll taxes than they receive through benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit. It’s not just poor families for whom the payroll tax is a big deal, either. About three-quarters of all American households pay more in payroll taxes, which go toward Medicare and Social Security, than in income taxes ...

[Furthermore,] the government numbers I’m using here exaggerate how much of the tax burden falls on the wealthy. These numbers fail to account for the income that is hidden from tax collectors — a practice, research shows, that is more common among affluent families. “Because higher-income people are understating their income,” Joel Slemrod, a tax scholar at the University of Michigan, says, “We’ve been overstating their average tax rates.”

State and local taxes, meanwhile, may actually be regressive. That is, middle-class and poor families may face higher tax rates than the wealthy...

But those pesky facts aren't keeping Tea Party caucus leader Rep. Bachmann from voting for a budget that cuts more taxes for the wealthy, then supporting higher taxes on the poor and middle-class.

Since she is so willing to state her position on national television, I'm sure she won't mind others pointing it out.

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