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Celebrating the Joys of April 15

The Internal Revenue Service needs to get way better at marketing.

Somehow the government tax collectors have let the country get locked into the idea that April 15 is a day of sorrow and misery, the culmination of the dreaded filing of the income tax form.

But, in fact, most people who file get money back. (Cue the horns and balloons.)

And according to one much, much-quoted study by the Tax Policy Center, 47 percent of American households didn’t have to pay one cent of income tax for 2009. (Marching bands, confetti.)

Thanks to the tax credits in President Obama’s stimulus plan and other programs aimed at helping working families, couples with two kids making up to $50,000 were generally off the hook this year.

Naturally, anti-tax groups held rallies to thank the president for doing so much to reduce the burden on the half of the country least able to pay. Not.

“We need to cut taxes so that our families can keep more of what they earn and produce and our mom-and-pops then, our small businesses, can reinvest according to our own priorities,” said Sarah Palin, at a Tea Party, anti-tax rally in Boston on Wednesday. This was the most coherent thing she had to say about taxation, although there was quite a bit of “Drill, baby, drill!”

According to the Gallup polls, 45 percent of Tea Party supporters have incomes under $50,000. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll, Tea Party activists are virtually the only segment of the population in which a majority feels its tax burden is unfair. Clearly, these are not the kind of folks who would cancel their anti-tax rallies just on account of not being taxed.

“We’re here to take our country back,” said a former Missouri House speaker at a Tea Party rally at the State Capitol, where nobody appeared to be grateful for the good news about the bottom 47 percent at all.

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Gail CollinsCredit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Let us stop for a minute and consider this “take our country back” mantra. Some people believe it is the cry of angry white men who don’t like seeing a lot of blacks, women and gay people in positions of power. I prefer a less depressing explanation, which is that all this yearning for the golden days of yore has less to do with Washington than with the fact that so many of the Tea Partyists appear to be in late middle age. I think they just want to go back to the country that existed when they were 28 and looked really good in tight-fitting jeans. Which is no longer the case.

But we digress. About that 47 percent figure. Even the Tax Policy Center, which came up with it, doesn’t seem all that thrilled with the attention it’s getting.

“That viral number,” sighed Bob Williams, a senior fellow at the center. He is worried that the country is getting the impression that the bottom 47 percent is not paying anything for government services. But there are, of course, a lot of other taxes, particularly the big whoppers that are taken out of paychecks to pay for Social Security and Medicare, the programs everybody seems to like.

“This is looking only at income tax,” Williams said. “If we toss in payroll tax, only 13 percent are exempt from both — almost all low-income elderly.”

Clearly, we need a THANKS, GOVERNMENT!!!! parade of low-income elderly.

And shouldn’t there be better signage on paychecks? Nobody reads the fine print that shows how their gross pay shriveled into the take-home. Maybe the I.R.S. could stick in a big red box saying ZERO INCOME TAXES whenever appropriate.

While we’re at it, we could celebrate the top earners, who pay the bulk of the taxes, thanks to their having the bulk of the money. We don’t need to shed tears for them. The after-tax income of the top 1 percent more than tripled since 1979, while the bottom-dwellers barely moved an inch.

Still, good job, wealthy people! You worked hard, played by the rules and the nation appreciates your support for the national defense, highways, meat inspection and national parks.

When President Obama gives a domestic policy speech, there’s usually a cleaning woman who has no health insurance or a laid-off firefighter invited to come onstage. But on April 15, maybe he could give a hug to a corporate lawyer who pulled down $3 million and gave half of it back.

There’s no reason not to show the top taxpayers a little love. Paying a lot of taxes should be a badge of honor. It proves you made it into the league of big money-makers, not to mention the fact that you’re supporting the upkeep of the Grand Canyon. If the I.R.S. had been doing its marketing properly, little kids would dream of growing up to become really big taxpayers.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: Celebrating The Joys Of April 15. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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