Deadbeat Nation
by digby
Dday and I wrote about this earlier and I've been hearing this trope all day coming from various wingnuts on TV, so I assume it's a new conservative article of faith:
OBAMA [audio clip]: I want to give all these folks who are, you know, bus drivers, teachers, autoworkers, who make less -- I want to give them a tax cut.
QUINN: Wait a minute. Let -- hold on a second. He wants to give them a tax cut. Most of those people he just mentioned, if they fall into the average-income category that we're talking about here, don't pay any taxes. So how do you give them a tax cut? You give them a tax cut by taking away Joe's money and redistributing the wealth to them.
They are seriously trying to convince people now that Obama wants to take the money from "hard working Americans" and hand it to deadbeats. As dday explained earlier:
I think Atrios makes the salient point.
Basically everybody pays taxes. So you when you're talking about giving free money to people who don't pay any taxes, that must be somebody else because, you know, I pay taxes.
But bus drivers, teachers and auto workers? They're deadbeat lucky duckies too? Retail salespeople? Truck drivers? Office workers? Nurses? Cops? All of them?
The dissonance is getting so bad I think their heads may literally start to explode. I realize that the true dittoheads like Joe the Plumber actually believe that they will be better off if rich people don't have to pay taxes because he's sure he's going to be rich one day too and wants to preserve the privileges he doesn't yet have. But does Joe believe that everyone but he and the rich guys aren't paying any taxes at all?
Update: it's a virus.