The tea parties demonstrated that resistance to big government persists in the hearts of many Americans. And yet, Roesgen has a shadow of a point. When the vast majority of Americans are getting benefits from the government but not paying the bill, the constituency for tax reform does shrink. As Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam note in their book "Grand New Party": "Just before the Reagan tax cuts, a median-income four-person family paid about 12 percent of their total income in federal income taxes. Reducing that burden, predictably enough, yielded a political windfall for Republicans ... Today the bite the federal income tax takes out of working class and middle-class paychecks stands at roughly half the pre-Reagan level."
A recent Gallup poll found that only 46 percent of Americans say their taxes are "too high." Fifty-two percent of those earning between $30,000 and $75,000 said their taxes were "about right." IRS data show why this should be so. Those earning more than $388,806 in 2006, the top 1 percent of earners, paid about 40 percent of the taxes. The top 5 percent, those earning above $153,542, paid 60 percent of the taxes. And the top 10 percent, those earning more than $108,904, paid more than 70 percent of all taxes. Some, including President Obama, argue that the wealthy were disproportionately benefited by the Bush era tax cuts. But as the American Enterprise Institute's Kevin Hassett has pointed out, the tax share shouldered by the wealthy increased more than the share of income going to that group during the past decade.
Still, the numbers suggest that income tax reductions are not going to be the royal road back to popularity for the Republican Party. The path back to political viability will have to be found elsewhere. More on that in future columns.