43% of Americans Agree: Someone Else Should Pay Higher Taxes!

Two tidbits on the debt ceiling/reduction issue, tangentially related.  From the Daily Caller:

An overnight poll conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs finds Americans increasingly concerned about the debt ceiling and closely divided on the question of whether the GOP or the White House needs to give way.

The poll was conducted after President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner made televised comments Monday night about the debt ceiling.

Among the respondents who wanted to see both sides give ground, 49 percent leaned toward spending cuts and 43 percent favor tax increases, read the report.


Where have I seen that 43% figure before? Oh, yeah:


On April 15, don't be surprised if the line at your local post office is a bit shorter than usual. That's because your neighbors may not be paying any income taxes this year.

An astonishing 43.4 percent of Americans now pay zero or negative federal income taxes. The number of single or jointly-filing "taxpayers" - the word must be applied sparingly - who pay no taxes or receive government handouts has reached 65.6 million, out of a total of 151 million.

Those numbers come from an analysis published yesterday by the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. Neither is a low-tax or conservative advocacy group...

"You've got a larger and larger share of people paying less and less for the services provided by the federal government," says Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. "The concern is that the majority can say, 'Let's have more benefits, spend more,' if they're not paying for it. It's 'free.' That's not a good thing to have.

You don't think Obama knows about that magic number - 43% - and figures he's got them in the bag in 2012? Now all he needs to do is to throw enough mud to confuse another 8%, and we'll become the United Socialist States of America, now and forever, amen.

Of course, the most famous problem with socialism is that eventually, you run out of other people's money. But I guess America's 43% never heard of that old saying, and for some reason I feel fairly confident Barack Obama would be the last man to try to educate them on it...