It's time for a reality check. Republicans bear heavy responsibility for creating "the takers", the infamous 47% of households who pay no taxes.
The real reason Mitt Romney lost the election is because he couldn't get Reagan Democrats to turn out for him enthusiastically, people for whom dissing the whole idea behind the tax credit programs expanded by Reagan and Bush 43 to subsidize working families just like them sounded foreign coming from the mouth of a Republican candidate for president. I refer to the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit.
Reagan had made the former his answer to welfare dependency, and George W. Bush further expanded it and also doubled the latter, to the point that now, as the Tax Policy Center says here:
[T]he Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit . . . are the major reason many low-income working families avoid the income tax. About one-third of those who don’t pay are families with kids.
This New York Times graphic, using Tax Foundation data, shows how the percentage of non-taxpaying filers had grown by over 50% since 1986 through the end of the Bush presidency, and now under Obama has really ramped up another 50% so that since the time of the 1986 tax reform twice as many filers have no federal tax liability as did twenty-five years ago. If Obama has doubled down on anything, they were Republican ideas to begin with. To paraphrase an old saw, We sold them the rope they're hanging us with.
What once seemed like benign Reagan era social props have grown into major federal welfare transfer payment programs for the lower and middle classes in America, which is why liberals like Tim Noah here deliberately don't focus on them in analyzing the takers, "the 47%". To do so mutes their point that these people still pay the regressive payroll tax, which the EITC offsets. But practiced long enough, these lower wage workers getting EITC payments every year until retirement will collect Social Security without having really contributed to it themselves, transforming it, for them, from a contribution based pension into pure welfare.
Democrats are more than happy to have Republicans do this dirty work for them in expanding the federal welfare state instead of just acting as they do in more somnolent times as mere tax collectors for it. During the next five years, these direct subsidies to families are projected to cost the Treasury over $90 billion each year. In 2011 alone there were over 26 million EITC claims costing the taxpayers nearly $59 billion.
This issue goes to the heart of Mitt Romney's problem with the Republican Party: He had the temerity to point out the dependency practiced by too many Republicans. Unfortunately for Mitt Romney and the country, he had no constituency for this message, or at least not enough of one to get him over the top.
More than ever I suspect that this way of thinking is what was behind Mitt Romney's interest in "rectitude" in "equalizing" taxes when he was governor of Massachusetts, but also accounts for his statements distancing himself from the Reagan record in the 1990s when he ran against Sen. Ted Kennedy, just when Rep. Newt Gingrich was about to unleash The Contract With America. Reagan might have been an anti-communist conservative, but a fiscal conservative he was not, at least not in practice. That's what was really important to Romney at the time and obviously still animates him. But not his party which has made zero progress toward fiscal conservatism and has gone the other way.
Say what you will about Romney's social liberalism, it was his fiscal conservatism which alienated him not just from Democrats, but also from anyone receiving a big tax refund every spring.
A famous Democrat once said, "I didn't leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left me." But a fiscal conservative can't say the same of the Republican Party . . . in living memory it's never been there.
(graphic here)
