House Speaker Hastert Out of Touch

House Speaker Dennis Hastert has always struck me as one of those superficially pleasant clubhouse types who isn't what he appears to be. One thing is certain: he doesn't understand what life is like for most Americans. Think Progress has the story:

During a late session last night, Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) made a stunning claim on the House floor:

Well, folks, if you earn $40,000 a year and have a family of two children, you don’t pay any taxes. So you probably, if you don’t pay any taxes, you are not going to get a very big tax cut.

Think Progress goes on to point out the many ways a family of four does pay taxes, thus contradicting the ignorant statement of our House Speaker, second only to Bush in leading the Republican Party at the moment.

Let me add another common way working families pay taxes. Many people who earn $40,000 a year pay rent; Republicans like to think that landlords pay the property tax on the place a renter is living in but the money almost always comes from the renter. Every dime of it. Landlords are not shy about passing on 'their' costs to renters. In fact, one can argue that renters are paying a percentage of the landlord's federal income tax given the significant amount of money involved. As many of us know and have experienced, if a landlord gets a tax reduction, it's almost never passed on to the people paying the rent.

Personally, I'm surprised Dennis Hastert isn't being examined more closely these days. A lot of the corruption going on in Washington these days is happening under his nose in the final conference sessions that settle on what goes in a bill. Our powerful House Speaker is either not doing his job very well and he's perfectly well what's going on.