Surprise of the Week, Wherein I Give Kudos to Kevin Drum on a Tax Post
This post from Kevin Drum didn't start auspiciously, repeating the leftish meme that the tax day protests were all Astroturf events. But I must admit I had a real double-take on his last paragraph, wherein he points out something about tax polls that most people seem to be missing:
With Tax Day coming up, and astroturf tea parties being organized around the country, a lot of people have been linking to polls showing that most Americans aren't, in fact, actually unhappy with the amount of income tax they have to pay. Gallup, for example, reports that 61% of Americans think the amount they're paying this year is fair. Or there's this one, also from Gallup, that asks directly whether the amount you're paying is too high or not:
Not bad! 49% think their income taxes are just fine or even a bit low. Except for one thing: this chart shows exactly the opposite of what it seems. Consider this: about 40-50% of Americans pay no federal income tax at all1. That's zero dollars. I think we can safely assume that these are the people who think that their taxes are about right. What this means, then, is that virtually every American who pays any income tax at all thinks they're paying too much. There are various reasons why this might be so (a sense of unfairness regardless of amount paid, a fuzzy sense of how much they're paying in the first place, simple bloody-mindedness, etc.) but overall it's not exactly a testament to our collective willingness to fund the machinery of state.
Outstanding. Which only leads me to wonder why, if he realizes this, does he believe that people might not spontaneously organize protests, rather than it having to be a Rove-Fox News plot. I think the answer to that is the Left just can't shake their own perception that protest marches belong to them in the same way the Right feels that AM Radio is their media to rule. (What, by the way, does that leave for libertarians, other than Rush, Ayn Rand, and Firefly reruns?)
