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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (2391)	6/22/2003 10:41:43 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

HE SAID, HE SAID Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie? (Page 2 of 2) On the question of taxes, Mr. Bush made a claim in his State of the Union address that was not true, and he repeated it often afterward. "This tax relief," he declared, "is for everyone who pays income taxes." In fact, as the Tax Policy Center, a research arm of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, discovered, 8.1 million people who owe taxes would have received no tax cut from the Bush proposal and will get no break from the legislation that was enacted last month. Almost all of them are either single people with no children and no dividends or capital gains who were already in the 10 percent tax bracket, or else those with "head of household" filing status whose dependent is not a child under 17. But there are more than 100 million income tax payers in the country. So well over 90 percent will get some tax cut. If he had said "almost all," it would have been accurate. What is more important is that the tax relief most people will receive is quite meager, hardly the impression the president sought to leave when he campaigned around the country for the plan. Mr. Bush kept emphasizing the tax benefits for people with modest incomes, not the more extensive tax relief he wanted for the well heeled. He often had onstage with him a couple with two children and an income of $40,000 or $50,000 whose taxes would be cut by more than $1,000, mostly because of the increase in the child tax credit. But the indisputable fact is that the bulk of the tax cut will go to the wealthy. A study by Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal research institute whose calculations have gone unchallenged, found that half of all taxpayers would get a cut of less than $100 a year this year and that by 2005, three-quarters would get less than $100. On the other hand, almost two-thirds of all the tax savings will go to the wealthiest 10 percent of taxpayers, and the richest 1 percent will get an average tax reduction of nearly $100,000 a year. The question on Iraq and taxes is whether Mr. Bush stepped across the line dividing acceptable politicking from manipulation. Some critics hold that Mr. Bush twisted intelligence to conform with his policy goals. This can probably be answered conclusively only by historians when all the evidence and consequences are known. Mr. Bush seemed "typical of somebody trying to sell somebody something," Mr. Dallek said. "You look for what people are going to find most believable and persuasive," he continued. "In a sense you talk yourself into those ideas, and I have no doubt Bush himself was convinced they had weapons of mass destruction." When he signed the tax bill into law last month at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, the president introduced Jenny Tyson of Omaha, the wife of an Air Force sergeant serving in the Pacific. With two children, the Tysons "will keep an extra $1,300 a year of their own money," the president declared. That was true. It just was not the main point of the new tax law.

To: epicure who wrote (2391)	6/22/2003 11:23:05 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

The issue of what Bush said versus what the intelligence community believed and what has actually been found seems very clear to me: The October speech was devoted largely to the threat of banned weapons. Iraq, Mr. Bush said, had "a massive stockpile of biological weapons" and "thousands of tons of chemical agents" and was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons program." The president asked, "If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today — and we do — does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?" In the speech in March, on the eve of war, Mr. Bush declared, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Bush said Saddam "had a massive stockpile" which doesn't exist and the intel community could not confirm at the time. Then he says intelligence "leaves no doubt" that Iraq possessed and concealed weapons, the WMD they cannot produce now and the intel community could not confirm at the time. It's right up there with "I didn't have sex with that woman". Maybe that kind of BS isn't a lie in a politician's mind, but it sure is in mine.