Bachman's fantasy
by digby
I don't know if Michelle Bachman has ever read any Ayn Rand novels, but I think she'd like the plots:
“In my perfect world,” she explains, “we’d take the 35% corporate tax rate down to nine so that we’re the most competitive in the industrialized world. Zero out capital gains. Zero out the alternative minimum tax. Zero out the death tax.” [...]
Her main goal is to get tax rates down with a broad-based income tax that everyone pays and that “gets rid of all the deductions.” A system in which 47% of Americans don’t pay any tax is ruinous for a democracy, she says, “because there is no tie to the government benefits that people demand. I think everyone should have to pay something.”
That's so true. For instance the FICA taxes that every worker pays into Social Security and Medicare certainly create "no tie to the government benefits that people demand." They must pay more.
And certainly corporations and heiresses shouldn't be asked to pay taxes. That's just silly. They're the great producers of our society, the ones the rest of us parasites depend upon to bless us with whatever they feel we deserve.
Like I said, she'd love that dreamy John Galt.
Update: Matt Yglesias points out that Bachman's ideas (if you can call them that) are even more draconian than Paul Ryan's and that she's pretty much telling anyone born after 1956 that they are shit out of luck -- on everything.
There seems to be a common idea among these fiscal extremists that if they can only convince the old folks that they won't be hurt, then they'll have no problem selling this dystopian future to the country. I don't know why they think that. The over 55ers don't trust them to keep their word (after all, they're prepared to tell people 54 and under that all the money they've put in was for nothing) and they also tend to love their kids and grandkids enough not to want to consign them to a Death Race 2000 kind of existence. And I think they might need some other people to vote for them so blatantly screwing them probably isn't going to be a huge selling point.
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