EZRA KLEIN ably deconstructs the "very clever policy two-step" involved in the meme that the 47% of Americans who currently pay no income taxes are "takers" (as Paul Ryan puts it) who refuse to "take personal responsibility and care for their lives" (as Mitt Romney puts it in the video above). As he says, what's happened here is basically that Republicans have cut income taxes, that resulted in many working-class people no longer having to pay income tax, and now Republicans are arguing that therefore the working class (but not the rich) should have their taxes raised or their benefits revoked. But there's also a second two-step involved, and it has to do with the way Republicans sometimes emphasise and sometimes elide distinctions between income taxes and other kinds of taxes.

The way the first two-step works is pretty clear. The reason many lower-income working Americans aren't paying income tax these days, while they continue to pay other taxes, is largely that Republicans have repeatedly cut income taxes, and if you cut income taxes for rich and poor alike then the poor tend to fall off the scale. Mr Klein says:

[W]hen you look at graphs of the percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, you see huge jumps after Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax reform and George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. So whenever you hear that half of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, remember: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush helped build that... But now that those tax cuts have passed and many fewer Americans are paying federal income taxes and the rich are paying a much higher percentage of federal income taxes, Republicans are arguing that these Americans they have helped free from income taxes have become a dependent and destabilizing “taker” class who want to hike taxes on the rich in order to purchase more social services for themselves. ...So notice what happened here: Republicans have become outraged over the predictable effect of tax cuts they passed and are using that outrage as the justification for an agenda that further cuts taxes on the rich and pays for it by cutting social services for the non-rich.

But this is where we get to the second two-step: the linguistic elision Mr Romney indulges in when he says that "people who pay no income taxes" are people "who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it." In this case Mr Romney is using "income tax" as if it meant the same thing as "tax", a meme that has surfaced all across the political right over the past few years. This, obviously, is factually inaccurate: Of the 47% of Americans who paid no income tax last year, more than half (28% of all taxpayers) have jobs and pay payroll taxes. (As for the rest, 10% are elderly, and 7% earn less than $20,000 a year.)

The interesting point here is that while Mr Romney uses "income tax" as if it meant the same thing as "tax" when talking about the taxes lower-income Americans pay, Republicans are simultaneously trying to reduce the percentage of total taxes that consists of income tax. For years, it's been a fixture of the laissez-faire right that the federal tax burden should be shifted away from income taxes, which on balance discourage people from working (especially at the lower end of the income scale), and towards consumption and other taxes, which on balance encourage people to work harder and save more. The Republican Party platform this year actually includes a plank calling for a federal value-added tax, on the (exceedingly unlikely) condition that Congress first repeals the 16th amendment to the constitution, which authorises the direct income tax.

You can see this effect in Mr Romney's tax proposals, as well. Mr Romney hasn't promised to cut payroll taxes; he's promised to cut income taxes by a fifth, across the board. On its own, this shift means low-income workers pay the same share of the income-tax burden, while paying a larger share of the overall tax burden. Yet Mr Romney can continue to imply that low-income workers are freeloaders because they don't pay income tax. Then, Mr Romney promises to keep the tax cuts revenue-neutral by ending deductions, which he pledges to restrict to those earning $200,000 a year and up; this isn't mathematically possible, but if it were, it would mean the income-tax burden would shift even more heavily towards high earners, again perpetuating the line that the poor are freeloading. And then there's the consumption-tax option beloved of many conservative economists. If the tax burden shifts towards flat consumption taxes and away from progressive income taxes, it will fall more heavily on the poor. But if people like Mr Romney and Mr Ryan insist on equating "income taxes" with "taxes", they will continue to be able to claim that the poor are "takers" who are "dependent on government" because they "aren't paying any income tax", even while they increase the share of the tax burden that falls on the poor.

There's actually a third aspect of the two-step as well, but I'm not sure it qualifies as an entire two-step of its own. Let's call it two-step two, chutzpah style. Here's the thing: the effects of income tax in discouraging work are far stronger at the low end of the income spectrum than at the high end. The logic behind the flat personal exemptions in the tax code, and behind the earned-income tax credit, is that you end up with huge numbers of otherwise-dependent poor people entering the labour force and working productively if you tip the scales in their benefit. That's why the Clinton administration expanded the EITC, and it's been very successful. But the genius of the "they-don't-pay-income-taxes" complaint is that it takes the tax cuts that were implemented in order to get poor people off of welfare and encourage them to work, and uses them to accuse poor people of being shiftless and dependent on government. This creates a sort of permanent resentment machine, a renewable fuel source for class warfare of the rich against the poor.

And so we switch smoothly from one tax two-step to another. Do-si-do your partner and sashay down.