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

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (606890)	8/20/2004 3:33:53 PM
From: Karin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

The BIG lie... "George Bush's solution is cutting taxes for the very wealthy to push more of the tax burden onto middle-class families and then propose a new national sales tax that would place an even greater burden on these families." --Press Release (Overflow) from the Johns on a proposed national sales tax plan by Reps. Dennis Hastert and John Linder. Ok, we will settle for a flat tax. Bring back Dick Armey!

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (606890)	8/20/2004 4:03:38 PM
From: Knight	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Re: Tax Shift/The Rich Get Richer (fact-based rebutal) The article you posted states: But it's hard to square that Middle America rhetoric with a new study which shows that fully one-third of this year's federal tax cut went to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers. This an excellent example of distortion of the truth via the selective reporting of facts. Let's look at the raw numbers more objectively (see footnote at end for link to source). Based on official numbers at the IRS web site (as of 2001--the latest date for which these figures are available), the richest 1% of tax payers paid 33.89% of the total federal income taxes collected and paid an average federal tax rate of 27.5% of their adjusted gross income. In contrast the bottom 50% paid 3.97% of the total federal income taxes collected and paid an average federal tax rate of 4.09% of their adjusted gross income. Implications based on these cold hard numbers: Implication #1: The richest 1% got one-third of the tax cut, but they pay one-third of the taxes. The rich may have gotten richer relative to the poor, but it wasn't because of Bush's tax cut, since their tax cut was commensurate with the amount they paid. Implication #2: The richest 1% of tax payers pay a tax rate that is nearly 7 times (6.72 times to be exact) the rate paid by the bottom 50% of tax payers. No opinions here, just indisputable implications based on cold, hard numbers. It's amazing how numbers can be used selectively to give misleading conclusions. *You can retrieve these statistics in spreadsheet form from the IRS web site: irs.ustreas.gov