Right upset that poor pay no income tax

Paul Krugman

So the right is now apparently outraged at the fact that many Americans pay no income taxes — a true observation that is elided into the utterly untrue assertion that many Americans pay no taxes. (Almost everyone pays payroll taxes, everyone pays state and local sales taxes, etc.)

This isn’t new; remember the famous WSJ editorial about the lucky duckies who have the great good fortune to not pay income taxes because they’re, um, too poor to be above the minimum. I guess luck is in the eye of the beholder.

The thing to bear in mind is that overall, the US tax system isn’t actually that progressive: the payroll tax is regressive, as are most state and local taxes, which largely offsets the progressivity of the income tax.

So the right likes to pretend that the income tax is the only tax; it isn’t.