After the Washington Post reported that the administration was drawing up new models to prove that the rich pay too much of the tax burden, Joel Friedman and Isaac Shapiro, fellows at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank focusing on fiscal issues facing the poor and middle class, wrote up a quick report to explain why the rich pay as much as they do. The answer is rather obvious, but it's one fiscal conservatives hardly ever mention: The rich are getting richer -- and fast, too.

Friedman pointed to a landmark tax study published by the Congressional Budget Office in 2001. The study shows that between 1979 and 1997, the rich paid an increasing share of all taxes because their income "grew substantially faster than the income of other households." The study says that the income of all Americans grew by about 30 percent during those years, "but that growth was highly unequal among quintiles." (A quintile is one-fifth of the population.) "The average income of households in the highest quintile" -- the top 20 percent -- "was more than 50 percent higher in 1997 than in 1979, while that of the bottom fifth of households was nearly 4 percent lower," the study says. (The rich, in fact, became even wealthier than the rest of us after Clinton raised their taxes.)

"They're saying the burden on the top is too high," says Friedman of the conservative position. "But they're missing the fundamental reasons for that. The wealthy are taking a larger share of the income. Their incomes are higher."

To make it seem as if the rich pay too much in taxes, conservatives often focus on the income tax, the most progressive of federal taxes. But "because of the regressivity of other federal taxes such as payroll and excise taxes ... the overall federal tax system is only modestly progressive," according to Citizens for Tax Justice, a public interest tax research group concerned with tax issues for the poor and middle class.

The payroll tax has long been a thorn in the side of people who say that the poor don't pay enough in taxes, and one way they've responded to the argument that the poor are burdened by the tax is by ignoring it. But now they may trying a new, logic-straining approach -- or at least Lawrence Lindsey, who in December was forced out of his job as chairman of the Bush administration's National Economic Council, is doing so.

"I think the one question that has been left ... is the question, 'What is a tax?'" Lindsey asked Dec. 10, at a speech sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. He went on to suggest that because you eventually get back what you invest in Social Security, "it is purely a private good" -- and that the payroll tax is, therefore, not a tax at all but rather an investment.

None of the tax experts -- from either the left or the right -- contacted for this article agrees with Lindsey's view that Social Security is not a tax. Bill Ahern, a spokesman for the Tax Foundation, a group that generally favors cutting taxes, says "the assertion that it's not a tax is something we disagree with." He noted that payments to Social Security are mandatory -- one of the defining characteristics of a tax. Bob McIntyre, a liberal economist at Citizens for Tax Justice, said a similar thing: "Don't count anything as a tax if you want. People still have to pay it."

And William Gale, of Brookings, notes that when Lindsey was arguing, a year and a half ago, that we needed a tax cut because taxes were at a record high, he was counting Social Security as a tax then: "If payroll taxes are not a tax, then taxes as a share of GDP are at a post-World War II low, and therefore we should try to boost taxes to bring them up to historical levels. So the administration is being hypocritical if it counts payroll taxes when it wants to say taxes are high and then doesn't when it wants to say taxes are low."

After Lindsey gave his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Sheldon Pollack, a professor of business law at the University of Delaware, took the podium. "I started off my talk by joking that I've been studying taxes for 20 years and I thought I knew what a tax was up until an hour ago," he says. Pollack, author of a forthcoming book called "Refinancing America: The Republican Antitax Agenda," is an expert on the Republican Party's attempts to cut and flatten taxes, and he says, to Lindsey's credit, that Lindsey's comments on the status of Social Security were "very theoretical."

Still, Pollack says that any real flat-tax plan will transfer the tax burden away from the rich and to the middle class and poor, and Lindsey's speech was perhaps an attempt to make the case that it wouldn't be so bad if the rich paid a little less. "There's definitely a little bit of an ulterior motive there."

But Pollack doesn't expect Lindsey's -- or anyone else's -- arguments for a radical flattening of the tax system to convince enough of the public that lowering the tax burden for the rich, and raising it for everyone else, is the way to go.

He notes that some House Republicans could pass a few radical tax bills, as they have in the past. For example, in 1998, by a 219-209 vote, the House passed the Tax Code Termination Act, a bill that would have completely scrapped the federal income tax code by 2001. The bill did not specify any means of recovering the trillions that would have been lost in government revenue; it was, by any measure of civic duty, very reckless -- yet after the House passed it, several members of the Senate expressed support for it. (President Clinton called it "irresponsible" and vowed to veto it.)

But it's noteworthy that conservative groups aren't calling for such a measure now, when they have a better chance to make it happen. Why? Pollack suggests that Republicans know that it's pretty hard to run a government without any money, and the Bush administration, he says, "is not moving to cut back the size of government. A lot of things are funded by the income tax, including the military."

In the end, the best way to look at the tax-the-poor rhetoric coming from some conservatives may be as pure political theater. How did conservatives manage to work toward the temporary repeal of the estate tax, a tax that most people had probably never even heard of a decade ago? They spent several years talking it down. They said it was hurting impoverished small farmers. They christened it the "death tax." (Their discipline on this one thing is remarkable, and one that Democrats ought to try to match: How much could you change the world if everyone decided to call SUVs "death machines"?) And in time, even though it led to effectively higher taxes on the middle class, people in the middle class supported the estate-tax repeal.

So the flat-tax idea may seem easily dismissed now, but there's real political craft to what conservatives are doing. They're taking baby steps toward stripping most of the progressivity from the tax code, slowly passing initiatives that groups like Americans for Tax Reform say are key prerequisites for an eventual flat tax. But the campaign is not just political -- it's psychological too. Conservatives are slowly nudging the public to begin accepting a crazy thought: "Hey, aren't I a lucky ducky? Shouldn't I be paying more in taxes?" Editor's Note: This article has been corrected since it first appeared.

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