Time to Accuse Poor People of Getting Off Easy

Yes, the poor do pay taxes; no, the rich are not being persecuted

It’s getting to be that time of year when right-wing pundits write essays accusing poor people of not paying their fair share of taxes. They will, of course, focus on the federal income tax, ignoring taxes such as the payroll tax, the gasoline tax and other sales taxes, to which low-income people contribute a good fraction of their incomes. These pundits will pretend that the only thing keeping low-income folks from being high-income folks is lack of hard work, which will come as news to the millions of people working their butts off for poverty-level wages and no benefits, who are at the same time being told that they ought to be paying more taxes so that wealthy business executives can pay less.

The right-wing critics will not mention the enormous disparity in income between the average worker and the chief executive, thereby obscuring the great take-home pay of the latter, and the relative poverty of the former. (Quarrel with my biased information source if you will, but by any account the disparity is huge.) Graphs will depict the tax contributions of different income levels. They will show that the richest people pay a much greater share of their incomes in taxes than those in the middle, and that many of those at the bottom effectively pay nothing because of tax credits for low-income people. Charts will depict what percentage of total tax revenue comes from what income levels, suggesting that the rich are getting clobbered. (Rather than acknowledging the fact that the upper income levels are where by far most of the money is, so of course that’s where most of the taxes come from!)

This misleading polemics will imply that the rich are being treated unfairly while the poor are getting off easy, and that a fairer system would be a flat tax. They will not consider how much harder it is to pay a given percentage of a poverty-level income than an income that is hundreds of times that. Instead, they will say that the richer people are simply being punished for being smarter and more hardworking than others, as though good fortune, good governance, and parents’ socioeconomic status contribute nothing to peope’s success. They will get indignant at any suggestion that factors other than personal virtue contribute to a person’s economic success, as though to consider the importance of privilege and luck is to deny the importance of effort.

None of right-wingers’ callous attitude toward the working poor should negate certain basic facts:

-You have to be quite poor to owe no federal income taxes, and even then you still pay other taxes. Last year, for an individual with no dependents, you had to make less than $13,460.

-People with three or more children could make up to $43,352 and still qualify ($48,362 for a married couple).

-These incomes are a lot less than what is reasonably considered necessary to meet basic expenses. ($21,436 for a single childless person, like me, in the Baltimore area)

I would ask those who think a tax exemption for the poor is unfair, how much would you demand from someone making barely enough to put food on the table? How much tax should they have to pay at the end of the year in addition to the taxes they already paid when they bought clothes for their kids and gas for their cars to get to work?

There is no doubt that many people who earn great incomes worked much harder than most. They should be rewarded for that, and they are. A lot. Even after taxes. So right-wingers, quit complaining.

Supreme Court Gets It Wrong Again

A district attorney’s office should be liable for misconduct by its employees

In the Thompson case, attorneys withheld evidence of the defendant’s innocence on charges of robbery and murder. Consequently, he spent 18 years in prison for crimes he did not commit. This case was not a single incident of injustice. More than one piece of exculpatory evidence was withheld during Thompson’s trial. More than one attorney knew about this and failed to act on it. But because of the court majority’s faulty reasoning, the district that prosecuted Thompson is not held liable.

The Supreme Court overturned a jury’s $14 million award to Thompson on the grounds that the district was not deliberately indifferent to the defendant’s rights. They said the district did not fail to provide its employees adequate training in the discovery of exculpatory evidence. The employees did the wrong thing, their reasoning goes, but their bosses can’t be held liable for it. But if the office responsible for putting the case against Thompson is not liable for the harm done to him, who is? Plus, it wasn’t just one rogue employee who did Thompson in. It’s clear that the prosecutors broke the law and caused an innocent man to be convicted and sentenced to death. (Thank God "justice" is not always swift.) Why is that not reason enough to hold the district responsible?

If they’re worried about endless lawsuits against district attorneys, it is hard to see why. How often do prosecutors accuse the wrong person and withhold exculpatory evidence in order to get him convicted? If it happens often, it seems we need a lot more lawsuits. If it doesn’t happen often, then D.A.s would have nothing to fear from a ruling in Thompson’s favor. They would be safe as long as they disclosed all their evidence, including evidence that may indicate innocence. Their job isn’t just to get someone convicted; their job is to get the person who did the crime convicted. Making them disclose what they have is compatible with them doing their jobs. 

The majority essentially argued that the district attorney didn’t know what was going on. That he did everything he could have been expected to do; that he had no reason to provide his employees special caution about the disclosure of exculpatory evidence; that there had been no pattern of wrongdoing that would have alerted him to the problem. But if this is the standard by which a district attorney gets off the hook when his employees knowingly convict an innocent person, the standard needs to change. If the boss doesn’t know what his employees are doing, isn’t that negligent? Even if he does the best he can, is he not still responsible for wrongful actions taken by those in his charge?

The court was wrong to take away Thompson’s award. $14 million is the least society can do to repair the damage of an innocent person's 18 years in prison.

Read the atrocious opinions of Justices Thomas and Scalia for yourself, as well as Justice Ginsberg’s devastating dissent:

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-571.pdf