Just after 11 P.M. Tuesday night, the House of Representatives passed a package to pull the country back up the fiscal cliff, which it had fallen off twenty-three hours earlier. President Obama wanted this deal, even though it doesn’t look like what he campaigned on. It extends the Bush tax cuts for individual and family incomes of $400,000 and $450,000, respectively. The final vote was two hundred and fifty-seven to a hundred and sixty-seven, with more Democrats supporting it than Republicans. Speaker John Boehner was one of the “yes” votes, after a full day of G.O.P. theatrics in which it looked, for a time, like the House had blown up the agreement.

What saved the deal was not the Republicans’ decisiveness but their divisions. The party was too fractured to carry out what appeared, around midday, to be the plan: pass an amended version of the bill that the President couldn’t possibly support, send it back to the Senate, and pretend that it was all the Democrats’ fault. It was scuttled in the course of a power struggle between Boehner and Congressman Eric Cantor. One reason this Congress has statistically been the least productive in history is what’s known as the Hastert rule, by which a “majority of the majority”—of the Republican caucus—must support a bill before it will be brought to a vote. That rule was abandoned Tuesday night. The identity and priorities of the Republican party were too confused for it to be sustained.

And yet this deal, and Obama’s own agenda, have been informed by the G.O.P.’s delusions, to a tragic degree. As John Cassidy explains, Obama gave up a great deal, conceding that people making $450,000 a year were off-limits for rate increases. More outrageously, cuts to the already highly regressive payroll tax are being allowed to expire, meaning that they will rise from 4.2 per cent to 6.2 per cent. Obama didn’t even fight for them. In his statement Tuesday night, Obama described the bill as “preventing a middle-class tax hike” that could have hurt families and sent the country back into a recession; that is true, but it allowed another middle-class tax hike that could have the same effect. He also said that middle-class families “will not see their income taxes go up.” That is false, unless one goes along with the idea—and most of Washington does—that payroll taxes, which are on income and levied by the federal government, are not federal income taxes.

If you have a pre-tax income of $50,000 per year, the fiscal-cliff deal means that you will pay about a thousand dollars more in payroll taxes in 2013. If your income is $111,000, you will pay about two thousand two hundred dollars more. And if you earn a million dollars you will pay—also two thousand two hundred dollars. (The Wall Street Journal has a calculator.) There is a cap, which means that the working poor and middle class pay a higher proportion of their income than the rich. And the richer one gets, the greater the unfairness.

That would have remained true whether the rate cut—which was a stimulus measure—expired or not. But it makes it worse, and may be a cause of great dismay for those who have been half-following the fiscal-cliff circus and reassured themselves that, if they weren’t in the top two per cent, they didn’t really have much to worry about, apart from the general degradation of our political process.

What accounts for the strange invisibility of the payroll tax? Part of it is priorities: the Administration wanted to break a philosophical wall on rates; it needed to protect unemployment benefits, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is one of the most important ways working families escape the grip of poverty. It did all three, and also raised the rate on large estates, fixed a harmful quirk in the Alternative Minimum Tax, and even dealt with the Dairy Cliff. (Milk prices were going to skyrocket if Congress didn’t Act—long story.) Those are big wins. And part is that payroll tax revenues are meant to pay for Social Security. The trust fund needs the money, and, many of its supporters would argue, the security of a separate fund of its own. And there is a feeling, right or wrong, that it also needs a veneer of non-progressivity—something to dispel the impression that it helps poor people more than rich ones. (Hendrik Hertzberg, who disapproves of the payroll tax, has a good explanation of the political calculations.) But how does that mean that paying for it should hurt poor people more?

The dismissal of payroll taxes as something meaningful is even broader, though; it is deeply, pathologically woven into the Republican world view. When Mitt Romney, speaking at a fundraiser in Florida, complained that forty-seven per cent of Americans paid zero income taxes, he wasn’t counting the many Americans who did pay payroll taxes. Whenever Republicans rant about the misguided untaxed masses, they, too, have generally discounted the money that most working Americans think of as their taxes. Is it that they consider it pocket change?

Perhaps Democrats need to do with payroll taxes what Republicans did when they started calling the estate tax the “death tax”: find a new way of talking about it that makes the stakes vivid. What is depressing, though, is that when the party did fight for the payroll tax cut, last year, they won, largely because of public opinion. They managed to make the hypocrisy of Republicans who fought for the wealthy but let taxes rise on the poor clear. They can do it again.

This is particularly important because of one of the other great absurdities of the fiscal-cliff deal: it set up another fiscal cliff, by putting off the question of sequestration—automatic cuts that go into effect if Congress can’t find other ones—for two months, just when we’ll also be hitting the debt ceiling Already, Republicans have been talking as though the sacrifice on the part of those earning half a million dollars a year and up have been so profound that the question of revenues has been settled, and the sole focus should be slashing domestic programs. But the ones who have really paid here are also those most vulnerable to such cuts. How hard is the President going to fight for them in the next round?

Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty