Steve Benen spots another zombie tax meme.

Michelle Bachman (Morlock, Minn.) simply goes for the partial truth that a large portion of the population pays no or low federal income taxes.  The truth is so partial as to amount to a lie in the greater context of the budget demagoguery that's so in vogue these days.  "We don't have enough federal income tax revenue, so let's leave the social insurance levies intact and gut those programs."  Re-read if you missed the scope shift.  Bad enough, but if you're an ambitious young Morlock from Wisconsin, why don't you go ahead and do this while reducing federal income taxes for millionaires?  It's not like the media is awake at the switch.

We keep hearing the drumbeat that "entitlements" are killing us.  The entitlements that are killing us are being funded by taxes paid for by these "no tax" lucky duckies.  If anything, that raises the stakes on saving the programs.  The social insurance programs are a part of the social compact and have been for as much as 75 years.  Their very existence is not what's killing us.  Look at the deficit impacts of the Bush-the-lesser tax cuts and you'll see most of what is killing us.

Orrin Hatch is a bit more subtle.  (It is generally wise to be wary of a subtle mind in power.)  His second point that Steve quoted first: he wants poor people "to help this government to, uh, to be better," presumably through the tax base.  First of all, they do.  See the social insurance levies, above.  See sales taxes.  See property taxes, passed onto the renters by their landlords.  See corporate taxes, which conservative economists always want to tell us are passed on entirely to labor in the form of reduced employment and wages, and maybe in part to consumers in higher costs of goods.  (They only like this incidence argument in certain contexts, those conservative economists.  I wonder why that is.)  Second of all, one wonders at Hatch's statement: "Not to hurt the poor. We should help the poor."  What kind of Morlock tough love might this indicate?  Our country gutted actual welfare in the 80's and 90's, preferring instead to provide tax breaks at the low end of the scale and living allowances.  So how is taxing poor folks more going to help them, especially when the only respites they get are on the chopping block?

[Those schooled in academic tax policy will understand that there is a humane way to have every dollar of income taxed, maybe even at the same rate as billionaires' income, but still have an allowance for the costs of living.  Demogrants will not be enacted soon, and probably not in my lifetime.  Politics are the realm of the possible, and that ain't it.]

More marble-mouthed, Hatch cites a 19th century French (FRENCH?! Aren't they still the enemy?!) thinker for the idea that revenues have to come from the middle class.  Look at the incidence of total taxes by income and we have see that progressivity is overstated, that we are taxing the middle unless you want to tax them at higher rates than the wealthy.  Krugman extracted from CTJ to make this point a couple weeks ago.  And then there are stupid politics on answering what middle class is.  Is someone making $250,000 a year a poor middle-class wage slave?  Is a Wisconsin school teacher making $50,000 a year after 25 years a fat-cat oligarchic overlord?  Five times the income is a poor but-for-the-grace-of-God SOB when it comes to the possibility of a small tax increase as a function of current law, where the five-times lower income is an overpaid fat cat who ought to be paid less than a Walmart greeter despite the college degree and critical role in our society.  The conservatives' goalposts keep on changing based on the desired policy outcomes, don't they?  What a surprise.

It's not like Democrats are particularly good or coherent on tax matters, but they tend not to be pushing one-way ratchets based on half-baked or fraudulent arguments.

Benen jumped on the neo-poll tax shades.  I've seen it, and I'll jump on that in a more appropriate instance, but this isn't the strongest instance IMO.  Then again, linkies functional end up being TL;DR for me.  (Unfair of me to complain when I'm not exactly in the Atrios school of brevity, but I make no great claims of being fair.)