Just heard a Congressman (can you guess fromn which party?) angrily asserting that 1/3 of Americans don't pay any federal income tax at all! So it's brutally unfair to ask those who make more than $250,000 in *net personal income tax* to pay *four or five percentage points more* to the IRS. Why won't that 1/3 pay its fir share?!

Even if the 1/3 figure is correct (I don't know one way or the other), what he didn't mention is that

1. those people pay no federal income tax because - according to long-established IRS tax policy - they *just don't make enough money*, and

2. even at the poverty level, they still pay federal payroll tax (Social Security), local property taxes, and state and municipal sales taxes.

And, yes, that goes for illegal aliens too. Everybody with a job gets a tax ID number and federal payroll taxes are deducted from their paycheck. Illegals can't escape sales taxes, and if they own a home they haveto pay property taxes too.

So the message to tax the poor more heavily for the sake of "fairness" to "those middle-class job-creators" who make a quarter million dollars a year and more is even more idiotic than it sounds.

Who's listening to these guys? Millions, evidently. Because (to paraphrase some of my middle-income neighbors) they don't like "freeloading, illegal welfare cheats who don't want to work."

Well, gee. Neither do I! But that very small demographic has zero to do with workers who earn too little to pay any income tax!