Low-Income Taxpayers: New Meat for the Right (washingtonpost.com)

"Who are these lucky duckies?"

You can't make this stuff up. The latest targets for the neo-conservatives are the working poor, who supposedly are getting out of paying enough taxes.

Now, I credit my friends on that editorial page with strong principles and powerful feelings of compassion toward high-end taxpayers. But it will certainly come as news to low-income families getting by on two small paychecks that they are lucky duckies.

Richard Sims, the policy director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, took the recently published example of a top CEO who earned $122.5 million in 2000 and calculated that his FICA tax rate was 0.00043 percent. Now that's a real lucky ducky.

According to Sims's figures, the bottom 20 percent of Illinois residents pay 10.8 percent of their income in sales and excise taxes, compared with only 1.4 percent paid by the top 1 percent of earners. In California, the comparable figures are 7.4 percent and 1.0 percent; in Arizona, 8.1 percent and 1.2 percent; in Colorado, 5.1 percent and 0.8 percent.

The last thing we need to worry about is whether poor Americans are taxed too little.

This is part of the recent Republican campaign against the poor. Another part of this campaign is revising welfare to not allow recipients to get education or job training to remove themselves from the lowest paying jobs. Or as Republicans put it "they have to work full-time to collect welfare and we will only pay them for a few years." Lucky Duckies.