The term has outlived its original use to become a part of the informal terminology used in the tax reform and income inequality debates in the United States.
This has led prominent conservative politicians such as Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann to propose that poorer citizens should have their taxes increased to make them more aware of the problems of excessive taxation and big government.
[1] 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney commented that "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote liberal no matter what... believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.
Perry, announcing his presidential campaign, commented "Spreading the wealth punishes success... we're dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don't even pay any income tax.
"[2] The term was, meanwhile, immediately criticized by liberals and some conservatives for suggesting that people are 'lucky' to be so poor that they are not eligible to pay tax.
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).
As of 2006, according to New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, approximately 10% of Americans paid no net federal 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."
[11] 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.
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.
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".