Since last August five of the top seven GOP presidential candidates—Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachmann—as well as Marco Rubio, current republican front-runner for vice president, have repeatedly claimed that “poor people simply don’t pay enough taxes.” For months now leading GOP candidates have pugnaciously chastised the nearly 70 million Americans who “earn an income but don't pay a single cent in federal income taxes.” 

Their speciously agonistic claims were further fortified last October when Erick Erickson (founder of RedState.org) launched a Tumblr page entitled “We Are The 53%” as a counterpoint to the popular “We Are The 99%” website that has become the prevailing metonym for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Erikson’s website is rife with stories from the 53% of Americans who pay more in federal income taxes than they receive back in deductions or credits. He writes: “I work 3 jobs./I have a house I can’t sell./My family insurance costs are outrageous./But I don’t blame Wall Street./Suck it up you whiners./I am the 53% subsidizing you so you can hang out on Wall Street and complain.”

His claim, and the claims of many GOP presidential hopefuls, however, rest on two mutually entangled, erroneous assumptions: 1) Occupy Wall street protestors comprise the 46% of the country that does not “pay” federal income taxes and 2) 53% of Americans are subsidizing all those citizens whose incomes are either too low, who don’t qualify for enough credits, or whose deductions and exemptions effectively eliminate their tax liability. The orthodox GOP strategy of demonizing the poor and working- poor is no surprise, but what’s particularly odious here is the party’s pedestrian comprehension of the U.S. tax system.

On one exceedingly parochial score, I’ll admit that many of the leading GOP presidential candidates are right. Indeed, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), about 47% of Americans did not pay a single “net” cent in federal income taxes in 2009.  GOPers err, however, by implying that the federal income tax is the only tax that Americans pay and in so doing subtextually excoriate what they see as our allegedly “progressive” tax system.  And while I must confess that our federal and state income tax structures are nominally progressive, that is—a type of tax whose rate increases as the taxable base increases—other types of taxes levied in the United States are decidedly not. As a result, when total revenues collected are taken in aggregate our tax structure flattens and such a system inherently disadvantages low income earners who, in effect, pay proportionally more on fewer dollars.  

According to a 2009 study commissioned by the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), poor, middle-class, and wealthy Americans each pay around 40% of their incomes in taxes, +/- 5%. 

The ITEP report relies heavily on an earlier non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) finding: although the wealthiest 1% of Americans paid more in federal income taxes than the bottom 90%, the top 1% paid 5% of their incomes in state and local taxes, while the bottom 50% (i.e., the 46%!) --many of whom pay nothing in federal taxes -- paid 10% percent of their dollars, or twice as much proportionately. The CBO also found that those in the bottom 80% of the earnings ladder paid around 9% of their incomes in Social Security taxes (the cap is still set problematically low at $106,800); the top one percent paid just 1.6% of theirs. It is critical to recall that after the income tax, payroll taxes represent the largest share of the federal revenue stream. (Monies collected on FICA tax actually represent a much greater percentage of federal government revenue than corporate income taxes or taxes on capital gains. In 1940, for example, for every dollar a citizen paid in income taxes a corporation would pay $1.50. Corporations today pay around 25 cents on every tax dollar levied on wage earners.)

Moreover, the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) concluded that nearly every state and local tax system takes a much greater share of income from middle- and low-income families than from the affluent. That is, when all state and local income, sales, excise and property taxes are tabulated, most state tax systems are regressive. Researchers at ITEP found that those in the top 1% of income earners paid around 5% of their incomes in state and local taxes; the next 4% paid about 7.5% of theirs and those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy – the poorest 20 percent of the population –paid around 11.5% of their incomes to state and local governments. Statisticians also considered excise taxes (taxes on cigarettes, gas, alcohol, for example) and discovered that the “average” state’s consumption tax structure is equivalent to an income tax with a 7.1% rate for the poor, 4.7% for the middle class, and 0.9% for the richest taxpayers.

And finally, relying on similar studies, Boston University economists Laurence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson found in 2007 that when federal income tax isn’t considered in isolation from other forms of taxation “the average marginal tax rate on incomes between $20,000 and $500,000 is 40.3%, the median tax rate is 41.8%, and the standard deviation of all of those rates is 5.3%. Basically, most of us pay about 40%, plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.” 

Until leading GOP presidential candidates can bring themselves to admit that our tax revenue structure is effectively flat they will be flat-out-wrong. Being right on tax policy is rarely synonymous with being correct.