Joe & Susie

It must be uncomfortable being a Republican these days if you’re just ordinary folk: a retail clerk, a truck driver, a factory worker, a mechanic, a seamstress.

It must be uncomfortable to learn that a high priority of the leaders of your party is to protect wealthy individuals from having to pay the same percentage of their income to the tax man that you do.

The fact is, thanks to loopholes and various gimmicks available, someone earning $500,000 a year pays a smaller percentage of that income to the government than someone earning $50,000 a year.

If, that is, they paid any taxes at all. A 2010 report by the Internal Revenue Service showed that 1,470 American millionaires and billionaires had paid zero taxes in 2009, taking advantage of loopholes approved by Congress (with, unfortunately, Democratic support).

Loopholes exist for corporations, too. The U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report after examining corporate tax returns filed between 1998 and 2005 showing that during that period 1.3 million American companies and 39,000 foreign companies paid zero income taxes, despite having a combined $2.5 trillion—with a “T”—in revenue.

It is still going on. In 2009, General Electric Co. revenues totaled $10.3 billion, and the company not only paid zero taxes, it realized a $1.1 billion tax benefit.

Maintaining the tax-loophole status quo is of major importance to Republican Party leaders, and you’d think Joe the truck driver and Susie the seamstress would question the fairness of that.

There’s a Republican television commercial asserting that millions of Americans have lost their jobs since Barack Obama became president. An absolutely astounding assertion, given the facts of recent history, but that kind of obfuscation is what politicians, including Democrats, do.

The Republican tax mantra is that a tax increase on business is harmful because it diminishes the amount of money available for job-creating investment. There is certainly logic to that. It is also logical to expect that money saved because of tax reductions is now available for job-creating investment.

That’s not the case.

Tax cuts pushed through a compliant Congress by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003, and still in existence, have allowed American corporations to keep hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of dollars that would otherwise have gone to the government. Plenty of opportunity for job-creating investment, right?

So how come unemployment in the United States has reached its highest level in 70 years? How come there are 14 million Americans out of work today? What happened to the saved hundred of millions, maybe billions, of dollars?

It has been suggested that some of it was used to create jobs, and millions of people have since found work. Just not in this country.

If some rank-and-file Republicans are uncomfortable, that doesn’t set them apart. Everybody else is.