I am an atheist. And I believe that government has a moral responsibility to care for the needy amongst its citizens. If you are a Christian voter who believes in a need for religious values in government then the Republican Party has presented you with a real moral dilemma.
As I wrote in the last column the Census Bureau has divided U.S. taxpayers into five equal categories by income. The bottom 20% of all American tax payers make no more than $17,000 per year. The second 20% make up to $28,000 a year. The middle 20% make as much as $46,000 per year. The fourth 20% make as much as $77,000 per year. And while the top 20% have no upper limit on their incomes they average $218,000 a year.
There are a couple of interesting stories inside those numbers. On the positive side there are as many Americans (one in five) who make less than $17,000 per year, as make over $77,000 per year. On the negative side, the gap between the bottom 20% and the second 20% is only $11,000, while the gap between category two and three is $18,000. The jump from three to four is $31, 000, and the gap between the roof of category four to the average of category five is $114,000. In other words, the rungs of America’s economic ladder get wider as you climb up, making it increasingly difficult to move from blue collar (category two) to middle class (category three), or from middle class to upper class (from category four to five.) But the slide to the bottom gets easier as you descend.
So if you are a “religious” voter you have to ask yourself: what kind of tax system would Jesus design? Perhaps he would choose a system which mirrored “That which you do to the least of you, you do unto me.” Or perhaps he would place an emphasis on “Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.” Well, under the tax cuts designed by George Bush which the GOP has voted into law we have a different emphasis.
For the bottom 20% of U.S. taxpayers the Bush tax cuts will save (without sunset provisions) $480.00 a year, or about 0.7% of their income. The second category will save about $4,024.00, or about 1.7% of their income. The middle class will save about $6,800.00 or 1.8% of their income, while the fourth 20% will save $11, 898.00, or 1.7% of their income. The bottom 15% of the top 20% will save about $25,294.00, or about 1.5% of their income. The bottom 4% of the top 5% will save $52,570.00, or 3.6% of their income. And the top 1% of all taxpayers will save under the GOP tax cut $471,176.00 each year, a full 2% of their annual income. To me that seems like a lot of rich people passing through the eyes of a lot of needles.
Meanwhile 60% of U.S. corporations paid zero income taxes from 1996 through 2000, despite soaring profits. Their lack of largess earned them, on October 21, 2004, yet another “business” tax cut of $177 billion. Those corporations which failed to hire accountants to locate loopholes, or were too cheap to buy themselves a congressman or President to create a few loopholes, paid just 7.4% share of total government revenues, their lowest share since 1934.
And just what have those tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans actually bought us?
We have 45 million citizens without health insurance, 36 million citizens live at or below the poverty level. Twenty percent of all Americans are classified as “working poor,” including 4.3 million families. Most of the 27 million American children living in poverty live with both parents who are employed and who can’t make ends meet on their salaries. After a decade of decline, all these numbers have risen every year since the tax cuts were introduced. The GOP congress has also refused to raise the minimum wage for ten years. And we have a national debt of $8,113,190,165,165.88 as of 5:29 am December 3rd, 2005. The debt goes up almost $3 billion a day. Your personal share of that debt, whatever your income category is about $27,237.00 at the moment – unless, of course you are in the top 1% of wealthiest Americans or a corporation, in which case your share could well be zero.
But of even greater cost than your purse if you are a Christian is that those tax cuts require you to sacrifice those whom Jesus cared the most about in order to preserve and protect the fortunes of those whom the Republican party cares the most about. In other words, those tax cuts require you to be a Christian hypocrite. To support those Republican tax cuts may well cost you your soul.
Part Two of Three Parts.
