Or maybe (if they are hiring, which is not a guarantee) you can get a job at Wal-mart, which will still mean you probably need food stamps and are in the lowest tax bracket.

This is not theoretical. This is a reality for a hell of a lot of people.

So yes, I think it is entirely fair that the people who are barely scraping by pay both fewer taxes and a smaller percentage, because the $50 or $100 that is painful to them is a dinner out for a middle class family and barely pocket change for the rich, who are, to bring it back to the actual content of this article, getting a lot more money from the goverment than the poor are. (And subsidizing people playing the stock market, when the stock market doesn’t put money back *into* the economy in a useful, infrastructure and services-building way, is ridiculous.

(Also, on that first paragraph, my accountant disagrees with you on how to properly file taxes as a self-employed person, and I’m going to trust her over a random internet person.)

Also, I stand by my assertion that if your business can’t afford to pay you a living wage, it should probably reevaluate its plan; if it would be illegal and/or unethical to pay an employee as little as you pay yourself, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to survive a downtick.

People who are sinking money into their own business shouldn’t be drawing an income from it yet, so they shouldn’t be paying taxes on said income. I never paid a dime in income taxes as related to my business, because I lost money on it (in real terms, as well as paper terms) every year. I suppose I could have paid myself and paid for my own UI and SS, then deducted the business loss of paying myself from my income, but the net effect of that would be to buy some base rate on unemployment when I laid myself off and added a net of nothing to the nothing I expect from Social Security in 2050.

There are still far fewer jobs paying living wages than there are people who want, need AND are qualified to work them. There are plenty of people who had solid, skilled, middle class jobs before the housing crisis made things go bust who are now scraping along on odd jobs, trying to make a go of small businesses, and food stamps. I employ a couple of them part-time, and am acquainted with far more.

If rent+groceries (or even all nondiscretionary expenses combined) account for more than 95% of your income, you likewise need to reevaluate your plan.

Also, when you are self-employed, you are paying more than that, because you are paying the traditional employers share of payroll taxes. Which a lot of the poor people I know are, because jobs are thin on the ground and you freelance just so you have *some* income.

Do you really think that poor people aren’t voting because they come April 15, they are more likely to have already paid more into the system than they owe? Is there even data to support the idea that poor people don’t vote?