14 Oct 2004

  
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I watched the debates last night, and Bush had nothing.

question: The minimum wage is at the lowest it has been in terms of real dollars for 50 years. Do you favor raising it?
Bush: Uhm, actually my no child left behind program is kind of like an economic plan...

Yeah, we've heard of it. It's a good idea, but it hasn't been funded and as a result has been a failure resulting in more children left behind.

But as bad as Bush was, Kerry left his big guns at home. There was one issue in the room that was left largely untouched. The budget. While Bush acccused Kerry of being a tax-and-spend liberal, Bush himself has been spending like a drunken sailor.




Bush claims that it's not his fault, given that the economy was already slowing and that even with the help of England, Poland, et al we have had to fund the lion's share of two foreign wars. That's true Mr. Bush, but according to figures released by the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, the real culprit is Bush's tax cuts.

The cost of of Bush's tax cuts is nearly THREE TIMES as great as the cost of a) the two-front war, b) the increased spending for homeland security and c) rebuilding after September 11th -- COMBINED!

And here's just a few of the details on the Bush tax cuts so far (as of fall 2003)

In 2003 here's the breakdown on income tax.
the lowest 20% of the american population got 2 billion in personal income tax cuts
the second 20% got 10 billion
the middle 20% got 17 billion
the fourth 20% got 31 billion
the next 15% got 48 billion
the next 4% got 21 billion
and the top 1% got 28 billion

Translation: the top 1% of the population gets as much money back in personal income taxes as the lowest 60% of the american population combined! But if you look beyond straight income tax, and look at other tax structures, the favoring of the super-rich goes further.

In 2003 the lowest 60% of the american population gets to share $1 billion in dividend and capital gains tax cuts, while the top 1% gets $11 billion.

In 2003 the lower 95% of the population gets $0 in estate tax cuts which were reserved exclusively for those that don't need them. The super-rich top 1% gets $6 billion in estate tax cuts.

Take a look at the graph above if you are still clilnging to the old trickle-down economics theory. Is a rich person going to start churning up money in the economy because they have 11 million dollars versus 10 million? I don't think so. Buying an extra Bentley aint exactly going to help the country.

Even if you believe that the rest of Bush's domestic poilicies are working, which they aren't, his economic policies alone have set our nation on a course for doom.


 
 
mollusk to: big brother
Comments (6)
 
 

Comments

  

well put - Bush and his administration just doesn't see that there are two Americas, and the gap between them keeps getting bigger. g-dummy can keep my tax refund, if it meant maintaining a surplus rather than rack up that huge deficit.

Earlier this year, he brought up a Federal Sales Tax.. which we may well be forced to go to. I can see it now, while I am behind the counter here at Piggly Wiggly, some rich jagoff telling me his Federal Sales Tax is only half the rate of the rest of the country.

cracker 14 Oct 2004

What this data glaringly ignores is that the highest quintile of tax payers shoulder more than 65% of the country's tax burden (The Boring Official Statistics). Any percentage-based tax reduction is going to help the people who pay the highest percentage of taxes. The more telling figure would be to figure all those billions of dollars as a percentage of the total taxes paid by each income group.

Oh, and don't get me started on the legalized price-fixing scheme that goes by the kinder name, "the minimum wage."

And I beg to differ on your Bentley remark. The money spent on that car doesn't go to a top-hatted monopoly sitting in his hotel on Park Place. If that Bentley didn't sell, the salesman would not make any money, the trucker who transported the car to the lot wouldn't make any money, the cattle ranchers who provided the rich corinthian leather wouldn't make any money, the laborers who manufactered the engine parts wouldn't make any money, the plantation owners who provided the rubber for the tires wouldn't make any money, and so on and so on...

Gomez 14 Oct 2004

I agree that the group with the highest incomes pays the most taxes based on a percentage of their income. As they should. And the more you make, the higher the percentage you pay. From looking at the tables you link to it looks like the top 1% can pay as much as 37% of their income to taxes. Of course that was way back in 1979, but that percent is lower now. In 1986 it dipped as low as 25.5%. The tables only go up to 2001, but I can only assume that the numbers have gone down further since Bush's tax cuts have been enacted. From being an independent contractor myself over most of the past ten years, I can tell you that my own effective tax bracket is roughly 25-30%. I would expect that if I was making millions a year instead of tens of thousands as I do, that the rate should be much higher, say 50%. If the tax tables don't continue to slide up the more one makes, the gulf between the rich and the poor in the country will continue to grow. In addition, there are lots of loopholes for the rich to take advantage of that the poor don't have access to. Dividend income that is taxed at a lower rate than W2 income for example.

Here's another interesting article that I dug up since the original post. Granted, there's a bent to the editorial that isn't exactly republican in nature, but the numbers are taken from the same website that you yourself link to above.
http://www.ctj.org/pdf/binge03.pdf

The deficit numbers that we are currently running leave America with little to no chance of digging ourselves out of the hole. Even with an amazingly positive surplus year like Clinton's last year in offfice -- which won't repeat itself, because it was based on an unrealistic tech bubble -- it will take us tens of years to reverse the spending damage done by Bush in the year 2003 alone. Anyone who has had a credit card will attest to the damage that racking up debt can cause to one's financial outlook.

I disagree that minimum wage should stay as low as it is now. If we do, then we can pretty well write off the lowest income segment of our population to a situation of desperate poverty, and no amount of poor kids managing to make it to college will be able to reverse the trend. Ultimately, if we don't help all americans to improve their situation, we are heading for disastrous results.

mollusk 14 Oct 2004

The last column of the chart reflects the 2001 tax cut.

As far as deficits go, yeah, Bush is a part of the problem, his "compassionate coservative" (a.k.a. fiscal moderate) approach makes him say, "yes" to spending far too much. However, the Democrats have never been deficit hawks, and I can't believe we'd be any better off if they controlled the executive branch.

There are plenty of economists who would argue that the reduction in deficits we saw in the 90s was the slowburn effect of Reagan's tax reductions of the mid-80s. As counter-intuitive as it seems, the numbers show an increase in government revenue following tax reductions.

Gomez 14 Oct 2004

The Republicans are for the rich. They dont want to give out what they call 'hand-outs', they dont want to play 'Santa Claus' - which means they dont really want to help the people who need help. Which is bad enough, but they then play 'Santa Claus' to the people who dont need help.

Cliff 15 Oct 2004

Gomez, Bush didn't get in trouble throwing money at social programs (which he slashed according to GOP tradition). Instead he threw a giant messy war and gave a needless tax cut to the selfish, or as I like to call them, his base.

The GOP cynically uses tax cutss to make themselves popular with socially conservative ignoramuses in the rural sector as a means of buying votes. The same constituency that knows nothing about the larger world, but will get behind any war because their values are a century behind, (y'know, like yours).

jpeg 16 Oct 2004