Progressive Ruminations

Taxes II: The Rich Get the Breaks

Here's an excerpt from the text of Bush's speech in Las Vegas yesterday:

"Just be careful -- all I ask you is be careful about all this talk about taxing the rich. You know how that goes. The so-called rich hire accountants and lawyers to maybe not pay as much, and therefore, in order to meets all these promises guess who gets to end up stuck with the bill?

"AUDIENCE MEMBER: We do.

"THE PRESIDENT: The working people."

Well, it turns out that Bush is certainly right about who gets stuck with the bill -- but the credit doesn't go to the accountants and lawyers. It goes to his tax cuts.

Jonathan Weisman writes in The Washington Post: "Since 2001, President Bush's tax cuts have shifted federal tax payments from the richest Americans to a wide swath of middle-class families, the Congressional Budget Office has found, a conclusion likely to roil the presidential election campaign."

Here's the full CBO report (1.6M PDF).

Edmund L. Andrews writes in the New York Times: "Fully one-third of President Bush's tax cuts in the last three years have gone to people with the top 1 percent of income, who have earned an average of $1.2 million annually, according to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to be published Friday.

"The report calculated that households with incomes in that top 1 percent were receiving an average tax cut of $78,460 this year, while households in the middle 20 percent of earnings - averaging about $57,000 a year - were getting an average cut of only $1,090."