MITT ROMNEY'S dense comments about the dependency of Americans who pay no income taxes were dense not only because they seemed to write off a significant portion of Mr Romney's own constituency, but also because, as Ezra Klein observes, "Part of the reason so many Americans don’t pay federal income taxes is that Republicans have passed a series of very large tax cuts that wiped out the income-tax liability for many Americans". It's cheeky indeed to have supported, and to continue to support, policies intended to reduce the tax burden of the middle class, and then to pretend alarm at the rise of a vast "taker" class which consumes but does not finance federal benefits.

These issues would be much clearer were tax rates sensitive only to income. If we're determined to reward mortgage-holders, the parents of dependent children, and so on, the government should simply cut checks to these people, so that it is perfectly clear who is taking what. At the same time, a transparent tax code free of social-engineering nudges would also make it clear that most middle-class households, and most of Mr Romney's 47%, are contributing to the public purse. The epithet "taker" suggests one who only takes out, who puts nothing in. But of course most of us put some in and take some out. It is surely important to consider the implications of the fact, if it is a fact, that we've reached a point where nearly half the population takes more out than it pays in.

However, this has no clear partisan upshot, which would be obvious if parents, home-owners, and the like got their government transfers as checks in the mail rather than deductions in the tax code. The difference between Democrats and Republicans is not that Republicans oppose redistribution while Democrats support it. Both parties are stout defenders of redistribution to the interest groups of their respective party coalitions. And there is a great deal of overlap. Neither party is going to drown the military-industrial complex in Grover Norquist's bath tub any time soon. Neither party has the self-immolating intention to cut the welfare programmes that most benefit the middle class. Indeed, the parties compete to promise middle-class households that they will be allowed to take even more out while putting even less in. These promises cannot possibly be kept, as we all know, but no politician is reckless enough to dwell publicly on the fact that, sooner or later, the middle-class is going to have to pay more for less.

The conservative maker/taker distinction, as it is actually used, is largely a strategy for distracting voters from this unpleasant truth. Conservatives and libertarians are always keen to split hairs about whether tax cuts amount to "redistribution". Keeping more of what one makes, they say, is not redistribution; it is a reversal of redistribution. Sure. Let's concede that. To get out of this pointless muddle one need only stop talking about "redistribution" and instead ask about the overall "distributive effect" of a change in policy. The distributive effect of tax cuts for the rich is that the rich have larger after-tax incomes and government has less to spend on various programmes, some of which might have helped the non-rich. It sounds a bit mean if one puts it this way. So conservatives don't put it this way. This standard bit of distributional politics is not so hard to defend, and does not seem so mean, if a vulgar version of the maker/taker distinction is taken as a fact.

Suppose we see high earners as our society's primary "makers", whose savvily-invested, untaxed income is the mainspring of general economic growth. And suppose we see the beneficiaries of tax-financed government spending as "takers", who are consuming the seed stock of the American economy. In that case it would be pretty short-sighted not to cut taxes at the top while cutting transfers throughout the system. Of course, Republicans have little to no interest in cutting transfers to families or old people or any other "takers" who might be inclined to vote Republican. So, in the end, the distributive effect of the Republican fiscal programme is to make the rich a bit richer while cutting next to nothing, exacerbating fiscal imbalance. Insofar as any "takers" see reduced benefits, it's going to be those least likely to vote for Republicans: the non-white poor.

For their part, Democrats avoid facing the ominous music of America's monstrously imbalanced accounts with a blithe Panglossian faith in the complementarity of government spending and economic growth. Weak growth? Goose it by ratcheting up spending! Strong growth? Spend now on the human and physical capital that creates growth! Massive deficits? Increase revenue by stimulating economic growth through smart, targeted spending!

The rhetorical advantages of Panglossian Keynsianism (Keynesglossianism?) are mighty. One is immunised from the need ever to threaten any groups' government-financed goodies. If it happens to be good politics to pit the lower- and middle-classes against the rich, Democrats are of course happy to do that. But the rhetoric behind proposals to increase upper-income tax rates tends to have more to do with "fairness" than balancing the books, because the books would balance themselves if only we could muster the political will to spend ourselves into prosperity. Progressive Democrats do use something like the maker/taker distinction to explain why the rich get richer whilst the middle-class stagnates. (The rich have rigged the system so that they can take the stuff the rest of us make!) But the preferred, moderate Democratic "out-from-the-middle" narrative emphasises the universal benefits of generous spending, such that "taking" government transfers and "making" wealth are simply two aspects or stages of a single process of "investment" in the productivity of America and Americans.

Though I find Democratic denialism about the eventual necessity of fiscal retrenchment ridiculous and irresponsible, I find myself on the whole more sympathetic to their idea that "making" and "taking" are not fundamentally at odds. The simple point I would stress is that it is impossible to take what has not been made. Our first priority ought to be to establish the conditions for robust, ongoing wealth-creation—for "making". America's big entitlement programmes, which facilitate most of the "taking" in our system, do need to be reformed, and soon. But it is even more urgent to put America back on a path to stably increasing prosperity. That America (#18) has now fallen behind Denmark (#16), Northern Europe's most successful social democracy, in terms of "economic freedom" ought to be distressing. It seems to me that our real crisis is not that America's "takers" are swamping the productive capacity of America's "makers", or that oligarch propaganda has suppressed the political will to spend our way out of trouble, but that neither of America's major political parties has much incentive to abandon its empirically boneheaded but politically convenient ideas about the way things get made.