Income tax day, April 15, 2010, now divides Americans into two almost equal classes: those who pay for the services provided by government and the freeloaders. The percentage of Americans who will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009 has risen to 47 percent.Sounds like she's talking about the Earned Income Tax Credit - which you have to be working to receive. Working people aren't usually considered freeloaders, but according to Ms. Schlafly they are remiss in meeting their obligation to earn enough to pay federal income tax.
That isn't the worst of it. The bottom 40 percent not only pay no income tax, but the government sends them cash or benefits... [Emphasis mine]
2008 EITC stats. In brief, around 24 million people received it that year. Frankly, I'm unsure what percentage that is of total taxpayers, and I'm in no mood for math tonight ;-).
Who exactly is it that pays no federal income tax? Here we see a surprise: 2% of those earning $500,000-$1,000,000, and 1.5% of those earning over that, also had no income tax liability.
You can only collect taxes from those who can afford to pay them. According to the US Census, in 2008 13.2% of our citizens were living below the poverty level. I tend to think the .gov can't squeeze too much out of them, or indeed out of people who earn even one and a half times that.
Preliminary Estimates of Weighted Average Poverty Thresholds for 2009 here. For a family of three, it's $17,102 - or about $8.22 an hour (40-hour weeks, 52 weeks a year), which is nearly a dollar an hour higher than the current minimum wage*.
We're in a recession, with official unemployment approaching 10%, and actual un- and underemployment estimated by some to be much higher, possibly 15-19%. It's a safe bet that there are many working people earning less than they used to before the current downturn - people who, under our current tax code, will owe no income tax.
Ms. Schlafly has said other interesting things:
Now that judges embrace forcibly starving someone to death, Congress should use its appropriation power to starve the judicial budget.
She's also anti-abortion, so it appears that she's another one who believes that life begins at conception and ends at birth. Healthy people who don't earn much money are "freeloaders" - because she doesn't want to help them - but by golly if you're brain-dead you deserve all the care available. Wonder who she thinks can pay for that? Surely she doesn't believe in providing medical care to the "freeloaders"?
This nonsense from a woman who worked against the Equal Rights Amendment, yet enjoys both a family and a lucrative career. Hypocrisy, anyone?
* Another thing conservatives hate
