Lucky duckies

The term's meaning has split depending on political persuasion. For many

Who are these lucky duckies? They are the beneficiaries of tax policies that have expanded the personal exemption and standard deduction and targeted certain voter groups by introducing a welter of tax credits for things like child care and education. When these escape hatches are figured against income, the result is either a zero liability or a liability that represents a tiny percentage of income.^[5]

The worry of the Journal's editorialist was that "as fewer and fewer people are responsible for paying more and more of all taxes, the constituency for tax cutting, much less for

Say a person earns $12,000. After subtracting the personal exemption, the standard deduction and assuming no tax credits, then applying the 10% rate of the lowest bracket, the person ends up paying a little less than 4% of income in taxes. It ain't peanuts, but not enough to get his or her blood boiling with tax rage.[5]

The Journal published three articles using the phrase "lucky duckies": "The Non-Taxpaying Class", the original article, on 20 November 2002;^[5] "Lucky Duckies Again" (20 January 2003);^[6] and "Even Luckier Duckies" (3 June 2003).^[7]

Expansion and limits of the original argument

In recent years, the number and percentage of Americans who pay no federal income tax has increased. According to a 2007 report by the Statistics of Income division of the Internal Revenue Service,^[8] in 2006 the Internal Revenue Service received 134,372,678 individual income tax returns, of which 90,593,081 (67.42%) showed that they paid or owed federal income tax for 2005. That is, 32.58% of those Americans who filed income tax returns did not owe any federal income tax at all for 2005. This percentage increased substantially in 2008, and for 2009 was 47%.

The federal income tax is only one of several taxes Americans pay. Americans who pay zero federal income taxes do pay other taxes, such as

Federal payroll taxes are imposed on nearly every American with income from employment (there are exceptions for certain students, certain religious objectors, and certain state/local government employees who participate in a state/local pension). Federal self-employment taxes are imposed on nearly every American with net income from self-employment above $400 (again with exceptions for certain religious objectors). So almost all Americans with some

As of 2006, according to New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, approximately 10% of Americans paid no net federal taxes.^[9] Leonhardt did not have figures for 2010, and there were several refundable tax credits which were created or expanded between 2006 and 2010.

According to Congressional Budget Office estimates,^[10] the lowest earning 20% of Americans (24.1 million households earning an average of $15,900 in 2005) paid an "effective" federal tax rate of 3.9%, when taking into account income tax, social insurance tax, and excise tax. For comparison, the same study found that the highest earning 1% of Americans (1.1 million households earning an average of $1,558,500 in 2005) paid an "effective" federal tax rate of 21.9%, when including the same three types of taxes.

In 2011, British financial journalist Ian Cowie argued that people who do not earn enough to pay tax should be stripped of the right to vote as they should not have the right to control how others' money is taxed and spent: "Their contribution is not just negative in financial terms – they take out more than they put in – but likely to be damaging to the decisions taken by democracies." His colleague Benedict Brogan described the idea as 'intriguing' and 'worth checking out'.^[11]

Precedents

In 2001, U.S. Representative Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) told The New Yorker:

I think we've got a major crisis in democracy ... We assume that voters will restrain the growth of government because it becomes burdensome to them personally. But today fewer and fewer people pay taxes, and more and more are dependent on government, so the politician who promises the most from government is likely to win. Every day, the Republican Party is losing constituents, because every day more people can vote themselves more benefits without paying for it. The tax code will destroy democracy, by putting us in a position where most voters don't pay for government.^[12]

Criticism

From liberals

The Journal was frequently mocked for its use of the term "lucky duckies" to refer to people whose lack of a federal income tax burden is the direct result of their lower income. This attitude was satirized as "let them eat cake"-style myopia.

Ruben Bolling's Tom the Dancing Bug comic in Salon magazine, for instance, periodically features a poor duck who keeps "outwitting" a fat, top-hatted oligarch by cleverly submitting to the misfortunes of his economic class.

Jonathan Chait, in The New Republic, reacted to the Journal editorial by writing:

One of the things that has fascinated me about The Wall Street Journal editorial page is its occasional capacity to rise above the routine moral callousness of hack conservative

punditry and attain a level of exquisite depravity normally reserved for villains in James Bond movies.^[13]

I will spend a year as a Wall Street Journal editor, while one lucky editor will spend a year in my underpaid shoes. I will receive an editor's salary, and suffer the outrage of paying federal income tax on that salary. The fortunate editor, on the other hand, will enjoy a relatively small federal income tax burden, as well as these other perks of near poverty: the gustatory delights of a diet rich in black beans, pinto beans, navy beans, chickpeas and, for a little variety, lentils; the thrill of scrambling to pay the rent or make the mortgage; the salutary effects of having no paid sick days; the slow satisfaction of saving up for months for a trip to the dentist; and the civic pride of knowing that, even as a lucky ducky, you still pay a third or more of your gross income in income taxes, payroll taxes, sales taxes and property taxes.[14]

From conservatives

Conservatives have also criticised the argument. Writing in 2011, Ramesh Ponnuru commented that "conservatives should seek to remedy the problem by cutting benefits rather than by raising taxes in the hope it will make people more eager to cut benefits. To seek to raise taxes on poor and middle-class people would be a terrible mistake. The idea is bound to be unpopular. And it would alter the character of conservatism for the worse [into a] creed openly focused on helping one group at the expense of another, a kind of mirror image of egalitarian liberalism".^[15]

Writer W. James Antle said of the thresholds enabling poorer individuals to pay no income tax: "Conservatives supported all of these policies ... [and the poor] are not exactly 'lucky duckies' ... it seems to me that a conservative vision of personal responsibility would entail having people living on subsistence-level incomes support themselves and their families before they support the government."^[16]

See also

• Taxation in the United States
• Working poor

References

External links

• Dionne, E.J. (26 November 2002). "Low-Income Taxpayers: New Meat for the Right". The Washington Post.
• Krugman, Paul (December 3, 2002). "Hey, Lucky Duckies!". New York Times. Archived from the original on May 29, 2006.
• Chait, Jonathan (December 17, 2002). "Get lucky". The New Republic. Archived from the original on 2015-09-13.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
• Balko, Radley (April 9, 2003). "Tax the Poor". Fox News.
• "Tom the Dancing Bug, featuring Lucky Ducky". search.salon.com. July 15, 2011. Archived from the original on July 15, 2011.
• "Number of Americans Paying Zero Federal Income Tax Grows to 43.4 Million". The Tax Foundation. March 30, 2006. Archived from the original on February 5, 2009.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
• Buchanan, Neil H. (23 April 2007). "Is it Really So Tough to Be Rich? The New, Brazen, and Completely Dishonest Attack on Progressive Taxation". FindLaw.