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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (149466)	10/28/2004 4:11:31 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

OT How about we let the people decide? A vote determines what is popular, not what is accurate. Also beer nuts and tax cuts are very different things. "Most of the tax cuts" is not the same thing as "most of the tax cut". Beer nuts are simple objects, and the term pretty much has one meaning. "Tax cuts" usually means specific changes in law that reduce the tax burden. It can also mean a whole package of such changes or even a series of such packages. Potentially it could also mean a reduction for one taxpayer, but this definition would not be used as often. If you use this meaning then a reduction of $1 for taxpayer A and $2 for taxpayer B, and $1,000,000 for tax payer C, amounts to 3 tax cuts and most of the cuts went to the two lower income taxpayers. I don't think Bush actually meant this but it shows how you can't just replace "tax cuts" with "beer nuts". I personally think Bush meant the greatest percentage reduction in federal income tax payments. By that measure he is right. The greatest percentage reduction went to poor workers who no longer pay taxes. Other moderate income workers who still pay taxes got a bigger percentage reduction of their taxes then many of the very rich. The very rich got the biggest dollar reductions (after all they paid the most dollars and the largest percentages to begin with), but I don't think Bush meant that. If he did he was either mistaken, confused, or lying. When thinking about percentage reduction Also there is the whole question of how you define "low and middle income Americans". If you define it as those the 60% with the lowest income you get one answer. If you define it as the bottom 80% then you get a different answer. The one thing that is pretty clear is that Bush's statement wasn't very precise. Perhaps it was deliberately not precise or perhaps not, either way it a pretty weak case to pick to use for the purpose of painting Bush as a liar. Depending on how you look at it, and depending on what Bush thought, the statement could be accurate, an honest mistake, a misleading statement, or a lie. Tim