So it's All About Who Pays Federal Income Taxes?

     Romney seems to have drawn a very clear demarcation between John Sununu's real Americans who build this country, and the class of takers: it all comes down to who pays federal income taxes.

    What's interesting is that, implicitly, Romney seems to be saying that anyone who simply got back a federal income tax refund is basically a welfare cheat. This would imply that Americans should not try to reduce their tax burden.

     Yet, Governor Romney, both he personally and the company he founded seem to employ some very aggressive methods to minimize if not eliminate their tax burdens. Is Bain a taker? How about Romney himselfwho paid a very small tax burden in 2010 and likely paid a still lower rate in other years-indeed we don't know if there were years that he paid nothing.

      Does every American who gets a small tax refund represent someone who is a parasite? It's a very uncomfortable discussion for someone with such an aggressive history of tax avoidance as the Governor does, to have.

      Another interesting point is that Republicans have been making much of the fact that close to half of Americans pay no federal income tax.

     Romney is not alone in this concern. “We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said when he began his presidential campaign. “We’re coming close to a tipping point in America where we might have a net majority of takers versus makers in society,” Rep. Paul Ryan said at the Heritage Foundation. “People who pay nothing can easily forget the idea that there is no such thing as a free lunch,” warned Rep. Michelle Bachmann.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/17/romneys-theory-of-the-taker-class-and-why-it-matters/?tid=pm_pop

    Yet, as so often happens when the GOP starts flagging a phony issue, they ignore that it was largely Republican Presidents who have given us this state of affairs. It was largely the Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts that got us to eh 47% Now they are demonizing the result of their own tax cuts:

    "Part of the reason so many Americans don’t pay federal income taxes is that Republicans have passed a series of very large tax cuts that wiped out the income-tax liability for many Americans. That’s why, when you look at graphs of the percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, you see huge jumps after Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax reform and George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. So whenever you hear that half of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, remember: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush helped build that. (You also see a jump after the financial crisis begins in 2008, but we can expect that to be mostly temporary.)"

     "Some of those tax cuts for the poor were there to make the tax cuts for the rich more politically palatable. “Do you think we wanted to include a welfare payment to people who don’t pay taxes and call it a tax cut?” A top Bush administration official once asked me. “No. But that’s what we needed to do to get it done.”

     "But now that those tax cuts have passed and many fewer Americans are paying federal income taxes and the rich are paying a much higher percentage of federal income taxes, Republicans are arguing that these Americans they have helped free from income taxes have become a dependent and destabilizing “taker” class who want to hike taxes on the rich in order to purchase more social services for themselves. The antidote, as you can see in both Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney’s policy platforms, is to further cut taxes on “job creators” while cutting the social services that these takers depend on. That way, you roll the takers out of what Ryan calls “the hammock” of government and you unleash the makers to create jobs and opportunities."

     "So notice what happened here: Republicans have become outraged over the predictable effect of tax cuts they passed and are using that outrage as the justification for an agenda that further cuts taxes on the rich and pays for it by cutting social services for the non-rich."

     "That’s why Romney’s theory here is more than merely impolitic. It’s actually core to his economic agenda."

     How do you square these "off the cuff" comments with Romney's claim not to raise taxes on anyone but the rich-through a secret plan(as he won't tell us which ones until after the election) to reduce tax "loopholes" which only benefit the rich?