There are several great debates going on today, 3 by Brad (most of the posters are anonymous, but most are keeping it civil as well).  Then Moderateman has a good one going that is now starting to digress, and I did not want to drag that one farther off topic responding to one point made, but felt it should be addressed.  It would have been much better in one of Brad's Instapundit articles.

Sean Conners made this point:

but you are correct in knowing that no democrat has suggested that they want to balance the budget by raising taxes on anyone earning less than 200,000 dollars a year in their campaigns. in fact many have called for tax cuts for "the rest of us." and elimination of tax for more poor americans.

While I have not been paying attention to exactly what the democrats are saying, for I know they are not talking "raising" taxes, they don't have to do anything to raise them.  They just merely have to wait for the last tax cut to sunset, and viola!  The taxes are going up.  But I did not actually want to discuss even that here as that is a debate in itself.

Instead I want to concentrate on Sean's statement.  Let us for the sake of argument assume it is true and that democrats really do have a plan (that would be one).  So they eliminate taxes on all poor people.  OK, first we have to define what poor is, and then what we mean by eliminating taxes on them.

OK, for the sake here, lets say that poor is any family of 4 making less than $40k/year.

Now here starts the problems.  The first problem is that while today,  a person making $40k may be considered middle class, that was not so 50 years ago.  When the Income tax amendment was passed 100 years ago, it was only supposed to tax the wealthy, and then only 1%.  Well, any working American knows that is not true today.  So what happened?  Wages went up, but the tax stayed the same or went up in rate.  Not until Reagan did we get indexing for inflation, and then not totally.

So the democrats say they only want to soak the rich.  Rich being over $200k.  Today.  So we soak them.  In 20 years, $200k is going to be middle income, and then eventually poor, but the soaking will not stop.  There are 2 things certain in life - death and taxes, and to that you can add a third, a politician never has enough money to spend.  So tax cuts are rare, and not to be trifled with.

But the democrats will promise today to soak the rich and give to the poor (modern day Jesse James, aren't they?).  But they will not change that and in a few years, all of a sudden, they will be soaking the middle class, and wondering why couples need 2 incomes to merely stay even with the previous generation.

The second problem is that no democrat, OR republican can ELIMINATE taxes on any working person!  There are 2 reasons for that.  One is that they do not want to due to the most powerful lobby in America.  The second is that they cannot because they do not have the power.

The first reason, is the most regressive tax in existence, and one that will never go away, just get worse.  That is Social Security and the Medicare/Medicaid tax.  Both have cut offs that leave the richest Americans not paying it after a certain amount of time, but the poor never stop paying it.  And make no mistake, you can call it whatever you want to, but the truth is it is a tax.  That one will never be touched because it is the "third rail" of politics, and the most powerful lobby, AARP, will make any politician pay with their career if they do.  So forget about eliminating that tax.  It wont happen.

The second reason, is that the politicians do not have the power to do it.  What?  A tax they cannot touch? Yes, if you look at politicians as being either state, or federal.  Federal politicians cannot eliminate state income taxes, state sales taxes (the second most regressive tax in existence), personal property tax, real estate tax, and a host of other taxes levied by state and local governments.  They do not have the jurisdiction or the guts to tackle any of those.

So when you hear a politician saying they are going "to eliminate taxes on the poor", they are lying through their teeth, and they know it.  At best they can be honest in their intentions and ignorant of taxes (but I doubt they would get as far as they did being stupid) and at worse they are using sophistry to try to get votes, knowing they cannot.  And indeed, in the near future, that they will be taxing those same "poor" people again as wages and inflation push them out of the "poor" category and into the "rich" category.