None of this is to suggest that it wouldn't be a good idea to broaden the tax base. It would. People

Romney, you will recall, said that he will never be able to convince these non-federal-income-taxpaying people to vote for him because they refuse to take responsibility for their lives and therefore need Obama government handouts.
Most of "the 47%" have jobs and pay payroll taxes. Of those who don't pay taxes, many are elderly. guinea pig airline travel rules And, of course, many of those who don't pay federal income taxes are Republicans and therefore are (or would be) Romney voters.
And, thanks to several changes in the tax code, combined with increasing income inequality (the vast majority of the gains in national income went to the richest Americans), it kept climbing--right through Republican administrations, and a Democratic administration, and a Republican administration.
One of the biggest jumps in the non-federal-income-taxpayer rate, in fact, came during the second Bush administration, when George W. Bush implemented two rounds of tax cuts. As the Heritage chart shows, these tax cuts helped spike the non-taxpayers from about 35% of Americans to nearly 50%.
None of this is to suggest that it wouldn't be a good idea to broaden the tax base. It would. People care more about systems that they participate in, so paying something would help more Americans feel ownership of the federal government and its policies. It would also lessen the perception that there are two Americas--the "makers" and the "takers." guinea pig airline travel rules (The divisiveness guinea pig airline travel rules that this distinction creates hurts the country.)
But if the goal is to "broaden the tax base," there's an easy starter fix: Repeal guinea pig airline travel rules the Bush tax cuts. Because guinea pig airline travel rules those cuts led to a huge increase in the number of non-federal-taxpayers, accelerating a trend that had already taken hold during the administrations and tax-code guinea pig airline travel rules changes of the prior fifteen years.
Willard Mitt Romney is an American businessman and Republican Party politician, who served as the 70th Governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007. Romney is the son of George W. Romney, a former Governor of Michigan, and... More