http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/opinion/campaign-stops/count-trump-among-the-takers.html 2016-10-11 09:42:05 Count Trump Among the Takers He benefited from government without paying his dues. === Because Donald J. Trump hasn’t released his tax returns, we don’t know exactly what portion of his fortune he has sent the federal government. But in the second presidential debate, he confirmed that there were a number of years where he paid nothing at all. A week ago, The Times But rather than attempt to convince the American people that he had paid his fair share of taxes, Mr. Trump has vociferously defended the virtue of his ways, even arguing that paying nothing makes him fit to be president. “That makes me smart,” he retorted when presented with the idea during the first presidential debate. He Mr. Trump’s assertion that people should pay as little as they can in taxes — because, as he told Mr. O’Reilly, the government will “waste the money” — fits with quite an old conservative ideology. The government is bloated, inefficient and trampling on freedoms, the thinking goes; therefore, it deserves as little of our tax money to prop it up as possible. It’s no coincidence that Mr. Trump proposed a tax cut during the primary that was But conservatives who want to starve the government actively obscure the reality of how it works. Americans like paying taxes just about as much as Mr. Trump does. Going back to 1957, a majority It’s not that Americans are all delinquents who don’t want to pay for the government functions It’s also that we’ve bought into the myths that we could get such things with a much smaller footprint and that we earn all our money without anyone’s help. Conservatives such as Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and, more recently, Paul Ryan have subscribed to a worldview in which the government could easily step out of the way and allow private entities to provide those benefits. Few taxes would be needed to fund the government in that case. Social insurance against poverty and tragedy could be covered by charities, they argue; the stock market, for instance, could take care of Social Security. When people talk about this sort of society, they imagine that it used to work like this in some simpler, better time. But no such era ever existed, as While voluntary charitable organizations doled out most of the social insurance before the New Deal, they constituted a threadbare network that quickly snapped under the pressure of the Great Depression. The same happened during the Great Recession: Private charitable giving from individuals, corporations and foundations fell as the economy faltered; it was the government that stepped in to cushion the worst of the blows. Privatizing government functions doesn’t work much better. Mr. Ryan has released It’s worth noting that conservatives who urge people to shrink their tax bills are talking to only one group: the well off. There are already many low-income people who don’t pay federal income taxes because they make so little, yet those people have been characterized as “takers,” in the By contrast, the wealthy who reduce their tax bills are simply keeping more of what’s rightfully theirs. But that wrongly assumes that fortunes are built in isolation. Plenty of government resources help make fortunes possible: Taxes finance roads and waterways that transport materials to build factories or goods to stores. Public education produces a work force ready to fill jobs. The court system enforces contracts and cracks down on theft. As Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, put it in Mr. Trump should know that fortunes don’t grow from individual efforts alone. Beyond the Yet for all this largess, Trump has avoided paying dues through income taxes. It follows a pattern he pursues in his business dealings: According to The founding fathers