House Speaker Needs Good Shaking

Somebody needs to shake the shit out of House Speaker Dennis Hastert before he explodes David Cronenberg-style and injures a bunch of innocent people.

Trying to justify his party's tax cuts for the wealthy Wednesday night on C-SPAN, Hastert claimed a family of four earning $40,000 pays no taxes.

"So you probably, if you don’t pay any taxes, you are not going to get a very big tax cut," he concluded.

In fact, if this family's $40,000 came from wages, they would've paid 7.65% (or $3,060) in payroll taxes, which funds Social Security and Medicare (and I won't even go into the regressive nature of having payroll taxes apply only to the first $94,200 earned). The $40,000 family would've also paid sales taxes, but I guess that doesn't count in Hastert's cranium.

Whether Hastert meant a family of four earning $40,000 merely doesn't pay any federal income tax is ultimately beside the point. What's important is that the Republican leadership doesn't believe wage earners should get a tax break because wage earners "don't pay taxes."