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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (317358)	11/10/2002 9:11:37 AM
From: D.Austin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Nancy Pelosi I'll bet she pays a lot of taxes ! August 03, 1992 The New Limousine Liberals BY JANICE CASTRO Democrats are forever calling the Republicans the party of the rich. But a new survey by the congressional newspaper Roll Call reports that of 28 SENATE MILLIONAIRES, 21 are Democrats. In 1992 Kenneth -------------------- On February 27, President Bush unveiled in televised address to a joint session of Congress his budget plan, featuring his $1.6-trillion ten-year tax cut. House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D.-Mo.) and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D.-S.D.) followed Bush’s speech with a Democratic response that should have been billed as a work of fiction. Here it is deconstructed. 1. Daschle’s Fiction: "In 1981, Dick and I sat in the House chamber when another new President talked to the American people about stimulating our economy. . . . We were promised that if we gave huge tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, the benefits would trickle down, deficits would disappear and the economy would flourish. Congress supported that experiment." Fact: Ronald Reagan never made a trickle-down "promise." His most famous comment about taxes stemmed from a moral position: The government was taking too much from all Americans. He addressed this by offering across-the-board cuts in income tax rates. He also spoke eloquently of tax cuts as a means of freeing entrepreneurs to create new jobs and new wealth. 2. Daschle’s Fiction: "Deficits skyrocketed. The national debt quadrupled." Fact: Increased federal spending, not Reagan’s tax cuts, takes the blame for the skyrocketing federal deficits of the 1980s. In the decade after Reagan’s cuts were enacted, federal revenues doubled, increasing from $517 billion in 1980 to $1.031 trillion in 1990. According to the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), "the entire deficit by 1985 was a product of drastically increased spending." Because it was so difficult to drastically slice the high level of spending the Democrats had established, Reagan himself proposed unbalanced budgets to Congress, but, then, the Democratic majority House of Representatives, which initiated every spending bill in the Reagan era, added $209 billion in additional deficit spending to Reagan’s requests. Sure, Reagan should have vetoed some of those measures, but it is patently false that his tax cuts, which dramatically increased federal revenue, were responsible for deficits spawned by profligate spending. Even so, the year before Reagan entered office the annual budget deficit was 2.7% of GDP, and the year he left it was only 2.9% of GDP. Source: Budget of the United States, IPI 3. Daschle’s Fiction: "Unemployment soared." Fact: More than 20 million new jobs were created in the 1980s. Unemployment fell from 9.7% during the recession of 1981-82–a recession that Reagan had inherited from Jimmy Carter–to 5.3% in 1989. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Joint Economic Committee 4. Daschle’s Fiction: "Working families struggled to meet their mortgages, pay for health care, and save for college." Fact: Real median family income climbed by 10.5% during the 1980s. Congress’ Joint Economic Committee found that the middle class actually shrank during this period, but not because they were getting poorer. Americans were moving up. The number of households making $50,000 a year grew from 17.6% in 1980 to 23.5% in 1988. Blacks especially gained ground. The share of black families making over $50,000 rose from just 9.2% in 1980 to 14.3% in 1988–a 55% increase. Source: Census Bureau, JEC 5. Daschle’s Fiction: "The President’s plan is deeply unfair to middle-income Americans. The wealthiest 1%–people who make an average of over $900,000 per year–get 43% of the President’s tax cut." Fact: Democrats have been using this number since the fall campaign. It is a highly deceptive statistic provided by the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). The CBPP came up with this allegation by using all federal taxes paid and all individuals filing tax returns. But not all those who must file returns actually pay federal income taxes. Those in the bottom 50% of earners are especially likely to be exempt from taxation because of various deductions and exemptions, and the already low rate of taxation in the lower-income brackets. By counting as "taxpayers" people who file tax returns but don’t actually pay income taxes, the CBPP greatly inflates the number of alleged "taxpayers" at the bottom of the scale and thus increases the number of people in the "top 1%." The CBPP also assumes that the benefit of abolishing the estate tax actually will go to the dead people who leave estates behind–not the living people who become their heirs. In most cases, the dying elderly people who leave taxable estate are far more affluent than the younger living people who inherit those estates. Through these and other statistical distortions the CBPP comes up with the number Daschle finds so compelling. What’s more, the top 1% of taxpayers–actually those making $269,496 per year or more–already pay 34.75% of all income taxes while receiving just 15.4% of all income. In contrast, the bottom 50%–those making less than $25,491–pay just 4.21% of all income taxes while receiving over 13% of income. The system is now structured to soak the so-called rich, and will be more "progressive" under Bush’s plan. Source: Senate Budget Committee, Joint Committee on Taxation humaneventsonline.com