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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (109744)	10/28/2007 4:21:35 PM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

skeeter, First, the actual dollars of a tax cut are pretty much irrelevant. Focusing on those numbers is a tactic the left uses to mislead people that don't understand numbers (pretty much their base) (ng). We all know that rich people make a lot more money. Therefore they pay a lot more taxes. If you cut a very big number by small percentage it will be a massively larger number than the same percentage cut of a very small income. That's just an unavoidable fact. The only important numbers are the tax rate and reduction of the tax rate. If the rich were given a bigger cut in their tax rate than the poor, that would be meaningful. I never analyzed the the full tax bill and don't think I have the accounting skills to to do so in an competent way. I also think it's impossible to trust any analysis done by either side or the media because they all have political motivations. The key is whether the benefit to the rich "as a percentage only" was equal to or greater than that given to the poor and lower middle class in income tax and targeted breaks. (the middle class benefitted from both) Putting all that aside, it is certainly possible to argue that cutting taxes for the poor and lower middle class would have been better. But that depends on what you mean by "better". It's a value judgement that goes back to my prior point. ANY PRESIDENT would have cut taxes and increased spending at that time. Only the details would have differed. What I will also say is that capital gains and dividend tax rate cuts tend to help the rich because they have more investments, but IMHO they are also among the best possible taxes to cut if you want higher long term economic growth (as long as they are accompanied by spending cuts - they were not). I believe Buffett is very biased in his analysis (typical of someone with an agenda). He always includes Social Security in his analysis of tax rates. That is an obvious blunder because SS is among the most regressive payments to the government on the planet. It's not really a tax and shouldn't be considered as one. It is a mandatory participation retirement plan in which you are accumulating an asset via your payments (your future SS benefits).