It’s official, Senators Mark Pryor and John Boozman are twins. Courtesy of Arkansas Media Watch:
Arkansas Senator John Boozman appeared yesterday on KUAF’s Ozarks At Large show discussing taxes and the budget with Talk Business producer Roby Brock (the Boozman segment starts around 7:45). At one point he declares that he would reject any tax increase on the rich even if every dollar in new taxes were “offset” by 10 dollars in spending cuts. Nothing surprising there. Boozman also claims that the tax burden on US businesses is “second only to Japan” in the world (not true but Boozman does mention the issue of tax loopholes), that “the majority” (50-60%) of those filing in the highest federal tax bracket are small business owners (false), and that US federal spending “historically” has been around 19% of GDP (Reagan spent between 21.2% and 23.5%).
By far the most brazen distortion out of the Senator’s mouth comes in response to a question about taxing billionaires, at 10:15 in the podcast:
“51 percent of the public don’t pay any federal taxes right now.”
This of course is not true. Boozman meant to say that half the public don’t pay federal income taxes. This would still be highly misleading. The federal income tax is by design a progressive tax which mostly falls on earners of mid and high incomes, based on the principle that everybody should contribute according to their means. But all working people in America pay significant amounts in federal payroll taxes (which fund Social Security and Medicare), federal gas taxes (which fund interstate highway construction and maintenance), and others including state and local sales and income taxes. Most of these taxes disproportionately burden low income workers. For example, incomes above about $106,800 are exempt from payroll taxes! As a result, as documented in an earlier post, the US tax system taken as a whole is not progressive at all: the rich pay about the same overall tax rate as the poor.
It’s one thing for a Republican to spout out this nonsense. It’s another thing when a so called Democrat joins him:
Northwest Arkansas Times today reports on remarks made by Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor at a Rotary Club luncheon:
Pryor said various tax breaks have created a system in which 45 percent of Americans don’t pay taxes. “It’s hard to have a fair tax system where only about half the people are paying,” he said.
This is a whopper. After Pryor’s colleague Boozman wrongly declared half Americans don’t pay federal taxes, the nominally Democratic Senator found a way to frame himself as even more politically extreme by claiming that half Americans don’t pay any taxes, which is of course completely false and an insult to a significant portion of Pryor’s voters and constituents.
Of course the subtext of all this is that Boozman and Pryor are really calling for more taxes on working and middle class Americans rather than the rich and big corporations. The folks living it good at the top while the rest of the country suffers are, in Boozman’s and Pryor’s shared view, the victims here. The folks actually paying more than their fair share of taxes and struggling to make ends meet are mooches. Ain’t that something?
I really hope Pryor retires in 2014. I don’t want to waste a minute of my time defending his worthless political carcass. The rich are getting richer at the expense of the rest of us and it’s destroying the country. I’d tell Pryor the Lesser to choose a side, but I think it’s pretty clear he already has, and it’s not the side of regular Arkansans.
