Billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who suffers from a disease in which he is rapidly transforming into Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons, told a Fortune-sponsored conference that his big idea to change the world would be “You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes.”
In aggregate, this means that the top 1% of taxpayers would have equal voting power with the other 95% of the country and, given that people on the cusp of wealth (or people who think they are) often side with their betters, it means a great deal more power even than that.
The Roper Center of the University of Connecticut tells us that Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney largely with the support of people making less than $50,000 a year where voters broke 60% for the president compared to 38% for his rich rival. These are the people making less than the median household income, which has hovered around $50,000 for years now. Voters making between $50,000 and $90,000 a year started to break for Romney. He took 52% of those voters compared to 48% for Obama. Voters who made more than $100,000 a year went 54% for Romney and 44% for Obama.
Seems fair enough to say that if we sold votes to rich people the way Perkins proposed that we’d have President Romney now, if not somebody richer and more right wing to knock out Romney.
The American Enterprise Institute tells us that in 2010 the 1.35 million taxpayers who were the highest earning 1% took home 18.9% of all reported earnings and paid 37.4% of the nation’s taxes. That year, 58 million Americans had neither no income tax liability or they received a refund through the Earned Income Tax Credit. Those people, who would all by definitions fall into the economic category that broke for Obama in 2012 would be totally disenfranchised under the Perkins plan. In 2012, Obama won 65.9 million votes and Romney got 60.9 million. The number of people who would get no vote at all equals 88% of Obama’s total get. While there’s no way of knowing if those 58 million voted for Obama or voted at all, it is unlikely he could have won such a close election if none of them even had the option.
Generally speaking, says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities the number of Americans who pay no income tax is not as high as it has been in the post-Crisis years. The recession and its unevenly distributed recovery has kept incomes down for most people and when incomes are down, tax burdens drop with them. That’s how progressive taxation works. This is a good thing.
Conservatives like Perkins whine about the earned income tax credit because it gives money to people who pay no taxes. A little history here – in 1986 the earned income tax credit was expanded by Ronald Reagan because he wanted to give people an incentive to work rather than apply for government welfare programs. It is a subsidy for low wage work so that people aren’t tempted to turn down a job offer because they might lose their assistance checks. It is cheaper than welfare, because people are working, and it encourages people to take lower paying jobs while they look for opportunities. This tax credit is a classically Republican notion that Republicans now hate.
Kind of like the idea of “one person, one vote.”
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