Let no one say that Paul Krugman hasn't developed a way with words during his time as a New York Times op-ed writer. His "Weapons of Math Destruction," New York Times, April 14, 2006 at A23 (available from this site if you have Times Select, and reprinted on this site --and many, many others--if you do not), talks about "lies, damned lies, and statistics." Among the lies--Cheney's assertions about WMD-producing trailers after intelligence analysts concluded they were not WMD-producing trailers. Id. Among the damned lies--Bush's declaration in his "Mission Accomplished" speech that by removing Saddam we had removed "an ally of Al Queda." Id. Among the statistics--Bush's assertion in debates that most of the Bush tax cuts go to low and middle income Americans. Id. Mostly Krugman focuses on the latter. Here's an excerpt (asterisks indicate omitted language) discussing the Treasury Department's "Tax Relief Kit" that "tries to create the impression that most of the tax cuts went to low-and middle-income families."
"Conspicuously missing from the document are any actual numbers about how the tax cuts were distributed among different income classes. Yet Treasury analysts have calculated those numbers, and there's enough information in the 'kit' to figure out what they discovered. *** Here's the bottom line: about 32 percent of the tax cuts went to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people whose income this year will be at least $341,773. About 53 percent of the tax cuts went to the top 10 percent of the population." ***
"[O]ne crucial piece of the Bush tax cuts, elimination of the estate tax, hasn't taken effect yet. Since only estates bigger than $2 million, or $4 million for a married couple, face taxation, the great bulk of the gains from estate tax repeal will go to the wealthiest 1 percent. This will raise their share of the overall tax cuts to *** about 40 percent." ***
"[T]he point isn't merely that the Bush administration has squandered the budget surplus it inherited on tax cuts for the wealthy. It's the fact that the administration has spent its entire term in office lying about the nature of those tax cuts."
Strong language. But as this administration continues to push tax cuts that will predominately benefit the wealthy while eliminating important public services and safety nets for the poor and continuing to provide various varieties of pork for big business (from accelerated depreciation provisions to the oil depletion allowance, from a manufacturing (so-called) deduction to the elimination of many of the foreign tax credit baskets), it is important that the American people be given the whole picture compiled by the administration on the impact of the tax cuts and not just a selected sampling with wording carefully edited to prevent Americans from comprehending the bigger picture.
Readers might also want to check out the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' April 10 release, Recent Tax and Income Trends Among High-Income Taxpayers, available here, discussing the Treasury's Tax Relief Kit. They point out the importance of looking at the overall tax picture and not just one type of tax--estate taxes, income taxes, payroll taxes and state and local taxes work together to determine the progressivity of our tax system. And when they are all considered, the system is just barely progressive. The wealthy come very close to paying the same percentage of taxes that their income represents as a share of the national income.
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