Citizens for Tax Justice, "founded in 1979, is a 501(c(4) public interest research and advocacy organization focusing on federal, state and local tax policies and their impact upon our nation." This is CTJ's home page. CTJ's examination of Bush's tax proposals turned up some interesting facts. Compare Bush's public statements about this plan with the information in these studies: Bush Tax Plan Benefits are Similar to Campaign Proposal: Skewed Toward Wealthy (.pdf format also available).

Bush has claimed that under his plan, the "average" family would receive a tax cut of $1,600. However, this claim is misleading. Almost ninety percent of taxpayers would receive less than $1,600 in tax cuts if the Bush plan were fully implemented in 1999. Moreover, 27 percent of taxpayers would receive no tax cut at all under the Bush plan.

CTJ Analysis of Bush Plan Updated to 2001 Levels (.pdf format also available).

The analysis shows that more than sixty percent of Bush's proposed tax cuts would go to the best-off 10 percent of Americans. According to the analysis: Taxpayers in the lowest 60 percent of the income scale would get only 12.7 percent of Bush's tax cuts. Their average annual tax reduction would be $256. [= $4.92 per week - tec] The bottom 20 percent of taxpayers would see an average tax cut of $47 a year. [= $0.90 a week - tec] In contrast, the best-off 10 percent of all taxpayers would get 60.3 percent of Bush's proposed tax cuts, and an average tax cut of $7,300 a year. [= $140 a week - tec] The wealthiest one percent of all taxpayers would get an average tax reduction of $54,480 a year--45 percent of the total tax cut. [= $1408 a week - tec] The income tax cuts under the Bush plan would affect different demographic groups in substantially different ways, with larger average tax cuts going to married couples filing jointly and to families with children.

For details scroll down to these tables: • Effects of George W. Bush’s Tax Plan -- (Annual effects when fully in place, at 2001 income levels.
• Bush income tax cut demographics at 2001 levels Media reports on the Bush tax plan have said little or nothing about these uncomfortable figures. George W. Bush has totally ignored them in his speeches pitching his plan. (To be fair, it's possible he may not have been told of these details.)

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2001

Answers

Sorry about the formatting. Turns out this software ignores two carriage returns in succession, so the only way to separate paragraphs is ^br^^br^. Learned something today!

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2001

NYPost

GREENSPAN GIVES BUSH'S TAX CUT SEAL OF APPROVAL Saturday,March 3,2001

By MARILYN RAUBER

WASHINGTON - Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan yesterday gave President Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut a big boost just days before Republicans try to ram it through the House.

"The changes in the budget outlook over the past several years are truly remarkable," Greenspan said of Uncle Sam's fortunes.

With Greenspan firmly on his side, a confident Bush dismissed a Democratic "trigger" proposal that would roll back tax cuts if the economy nose-dives.

"It seems like to me we ought to be careful about any 'trigger' mechanism. It ought to be on spending, to make sure that we don't overspend surpluses," Bush said.

But the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Pete Domenici, warned the White House that Bush's 2002 budget blueprint is already too stingy to keep Uncle Sam running properly.

In a sign that Bush's overall spending plan for the coming year could be in trouble, Domenici (R-N.M.) told reporters that "some functions of government just can't take as big a cut" as the White House proposes.

"The fact is a 4 percent growth [in overall spending] may not be adequate," Domenici, who backs the whopping $1.6 trillion tax cut, told reporters after meeting with White House budget officials.

Democrats, meanwhile, accused Bush of especially hurting the elderly.

They said the $153 billion he sets aside for Medicare reform over the next 10 years isn't enough to provide an adequate prescription-drug coverage program - and claimed it would take twice that amount.

At the White House, Bush defended his spending cutbacks as "fiscal sanity."

Greenspan, testifying before the House Budget Committee, gave the tax cut his good-bookkeeping seal of approval just days before the House votes next Thursday on the first $1 trillion installment of the tax-cut package.

Yesterday, after meeting El Salvador's president and promising $100 million in U.S. aid in the wake of two recent earthquakes, Bush headed for Camp David in mid-afternoon.

Bush defended his frequent Friday-afternoon disappearances to the isolated mountain retreat, which the Clintons rarely used, and said he intends to go "every chance I get."

Bush said he liked to go there to "spend time with my family" and that it was "a good place to relax" and "catch up on my work."

"I'm not saying I don't like my new address. I do. But it's good to get out into the countryside, too," Bush, who's spent only two weekends at the White House since he moved in seven weeks ago, told a crowd in Nebraska earlier this week.

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2001

"GREENSPAN GIVES BUSH'S TAX CUT SEAL OF APPROVAL"

Gosh!

I note that nothing here contradicts (or even mentions) the extremely skewed distribution of the Bush plan tax cuts as demonstrated in the CTJ analysis.

Greenspan can hardly be expected to act as an advocate for ordinary folks who won't get a tax break big enough to take the family out to dinner. He's well aware of the power structure in this country, since he's part of it.

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2001

Orlando Sentinel

Sunday, March 4, 2001

Story last updated at 10:20 p.m. on Saturday, March 3, 2001

CONGRESS: Non-tax relief

Democrats may call their tax plan whatever they like, but it is not "tax relief" unless the English language has undergone a total revision in the past eight years, during which "spending" became "investment" and the meaning of "is" became incompre- hensible.

Giving money to people who don't pay taxes is not tax relief -- except in the sense that if you take $1,000 from one person and zero from another, and send each back $500, one certainly is being relieved of his money.

That is what the Democratic plan does and most people would call that welfare.

President Bush has proposed taking a little less money from people who pay taxes. Why? Because the government does not need the money.

At least one Democrat understands the difference and he excoriated his own party for its position.

Democratic Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia warned his party's political leaders that they were making "a terrible mistake" with their class-warfare attacks against Bush's tax-cut plan.

Miller said that if his party continues to play polarizing politics on the tax-cut issue, "the voters are going to skin us alive" in 2002.

He said he did not like the tactics being used by House and Senate Democratic leaders to discredit Bush's tax-cut proposals and he denounced the rancorous language being used by Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe.

Contrast Miller's statement with the hysterical comment by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. on the Bush plan: "His tax cut will wreck the economy."

Nelson trotted out the Democratic dogma that the 1981 tax cut is the reason for the size of today's debt, a claim only the extreme left wing uses much these days. Once again, revenues increased every year of the Reagan presidency and every year but one Congress spent more than Reagan requested in his budget.

Nelson might have been confused by the ABC commentator who described the Bush budget, which increases spending 4 percent, as having "deep, across the board" spending cuts.

Or perhaps, being a freshman, Nelson hasn't heard yet that the current Democratic buzzword is bipartisanship, and civil discourse is supposed to be in vogue.

-- Anonymous, March 04, 2001

Published Friday, March 2, 2001, in the San Jose Mercury News

Reduce taxes for the right reasons

BY DAVID BOAZ

ADVOCATES of high taxes have denounced President Bush's preferred tax-cut argument -- it will help the economy -- as outmoded Keynesianism. They have a point.

In his first address to Congress, Bush said, ``To create economic growth and opportunity, we must put money back into the hands of the people who buy goods and create jobs.''

That sounds like the old Keynesian idea made popular during Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal: Cut taxes and increase government spending to ``prime the pump'' during a recession; raise taxes and reduce spending to slow down an ``overheated'' economy. Keynesianism seemed to have been finally laid to rest in the 1980s when President Reagan argued for a tax cut on supply-side grounds, and even liberal economists now agree that such fine-tuning has little effect on the economy.

But one weak argument doesn't mean we shouldn't cut taxes. Here are eight good reasons for a cut in income tax rates:

In a free country, money belongs to the people who earn it. The most fundamental reason to cut taxes is an understanding that wealth doesn't just happen, it has to be produced. And those who produce it have a right to keep it. We may agree to give up a part of the wealth we create in order to pay for such public goods as national defense and a system of justice. But we don't give the government an unlimited claim on our money to use as it sees fit.

Private individuals and businesses use money more efficiently than governments do. People with their own money at risk spend or invest it carefully. You don't find many $600 hammers or insolvent retirement programs in the private sector. Money will do more good for more people in private hands than in government hands.

High taxes discourage work and investment. Taxes create a ``wedge'' between what the employer pays and what the employee receives, so some jobs don't get created. High marginal tax rates also discourage people from working overtime or from making new investments. It's true, as some critics say, that our current marginal rates of 39.6 percent (somewhat higher when combined with other taxes) do not depress economic output as much as the 70 percent rates that taxpayers faced in 1980. But most economists now agree that a reduction in marginal tax rates will increase output to some degree.

Income taxes should be cut because the overall tax burden is quite high right now. As of the third quarter of 2000, federal revenues as a share of the gross domestic product hit a peacetime high of 20.8 percent. Prosperity has made Americans more accepting of the rising tax burden, but the current economic slowdown will make high taxes harder to bear.

If we don't cut taxes, Congress will spend the money. If one thing is certain in Washington, it is that Congress will spend every dollar it can get its hands on. Every interest group wants something -- a road, a dam, a social program, more teachers, more policemen, more corporate welfare -- and members of Congress want to be liked. The only way to ``put the surplus in a lockbox'' is to let the taxpayers keep it.

Lower taxes are the only real check on the expanding size and scope of the federal government. If we want smaller government, our best strategy is to reduce the amount of money Congress has to play with.

Elected officials should keep their promises. As a candidate, Bush promised to cut income taxes. As president, he should keep that promise.

For Bush and Republicans in Congress, this may be the most important reason of all: Republicans win when they cut taxes. Tax cuts unite the Republican base. The tax consumers in our society are well organized; the taxpayers need to be organized, too, around a tax cut program. In 1980, 1984 and 1988, Ronald Reagan and George Bush won three presidential elections by promising to cut taxes and then cutting them. George Bush raised taxes and lost the next election. I wager this is a lesson not lost on George W. Bush.

There you have it: one bad reason to cut taxes, eight good ones. President Bush should drop his weak argument and focus on those that work.

-- Anonymous, March 04, 2001

March 4, 2001, 12:15AM

Many Americans show skepticism over tax cut

By BENNETT ROTH Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle

CHICAGO -- As Carol Campbell listened to President Bush's address to Congress last week, she became more confused about his budget math.

The 61-year-old legal secretary couldn't understand how the president could reassure Americans that there would be ample surplus to pay for a large tax cut, debt reduction and slew of spending programs, and yet still warn that the future stability of Social Security was at risk.

A Democrat who voted for Bush, Campbell said she is not convinced that his 10-year, $1.6 trillion tax-cut proposal is affordable.

"I would always like to pay less taxes," said the suburban Chicago woman. "But I still question whether we can do all these things and still cut taxes."

As Bush begins his aggressive campaign to rouse public and congressional support for his ambitious tax-cut proposal, he faces deep skepticism among many voters who are not convinced they can have it all.

Scores of interviews conducted by the Chronicle confirm recent poll findings that while Americans are not opposed to tax cuts, they believe the nation has more pressing priorities.

And although some agreed with Bush's latest argument that the tax cut will stimulate a now-sluggish economy, many others are suspicious. They say his plan won't put a substantial amount of change in their pockets.

White House officials viewed the president's speech as a successful start in a public relations blitz to sell the tax cut. But the vast majority of those interviewed said they did not tune in to the address Tuesday night.

However, most also said they had picked up bits and pieces of his tax plan from newspapers, television news and the Internet. Even in Houston, the hometown of Bush's parents, the president's address didn't seem to move many people. For each person who did watch the speech, six to eight did not. Some seemed sheepish that they didn't catch it on TV, while others seemed to take pride in having avoided it.

Many voters say they have not formed a strong impression of the new president, who took office after a bitter ballot recount and without winning the popular vote.

A Reuters Zogby poll conducted after Tuesday's address found that 53 percent of likely voters approved of his job performance while 37 percent disapproved. Poll spokesman Alan Crocket said the rating showed "a ho-hum but not dancing-in-the-aisle" public attitude toward Bush.

The poll also found that voters ranked cutting taxes fourth in their priorities, behind funding programs for working families, saving Social Security and paying down the national debt. In response to another question, a slight majority still approve of the tax cut, but support has fallen over the last month, the poll found. Pollsters interviewed 601 people; the margin of error was 4 percent.

Bush has moved ahead to get the centerpiece of his campaign platform passed. He has proposed giving all Americans who pay income taxes a cut by dropping and compressing the rates. Furthermore, he has advocated doubling the child credit and easing the penalties on working married couples. The package also includes elimination of the estate tax.

Eager to give the president's tax package momentum, Republicans have begun rushing it through Congress, despite loud protests from Democrats that it is too large and unfairly tilted toward the rich. This week the full House is expected to vote on a reduction of income tax rates that was approved with only Republican support last week by the House Ways and Means Committee.

While the tax plan is expected to pass the GOP-controlled House, it is expected to be stalled for some time in the Senate, which is split between the two parties. Even some Senate Republicans have voiced concerns about its size.

Meanwhile, Bush has been playing traveling cheerleader for the tax plan, hitting states represented by lawmakers who are not yet committed to his proposal. This week, he is expected to sweep into Illinois, North Dakota and Louisiana to make his case.

Last week, a father in Council Bluffs, Iowa, told Bush he has "absolutely the right message" when it comes to focusing on education, but equally important for his children, he said, is paying down the debt.

However, outside these carefully choreographed events, there is less enthusiasm for the president's marquee proposal, even in the president's home state of Texas, where some lawmakers are blaming a state budget crunch on the large tax cut Bush pushed through as governor.

Chris Auten, a 59-year-old employee at Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth, said he voted for Bush. But he added that he would rather use the surplus to pay off the national debt than for a big tax cut.

"I think it would really make our country stronger. I really do," said Auten, who added that he didn't believe the tax cuts would make much difference in his life.

In Houston, Don Tucker, a 54-year-old medical developer, worried that Bush was promising too much without talking about the trade-offs.

"If we were in the boardroom, we would like to see the checks and balances of how you are going to make your plan happen," he said. "The only budgets you don't like are the ones that tell you what you can't have."

The administration did release a preliminary budget last week that included cuts in numerous agencies, but the president did not highlight those items in his speech to Congress or in his rallies on the road.

Bush's argument that a tax cut would help Americans cope with an anemic economy is resonating with some voters, such as John and Connie Jueger, a suburban Chicago couple expecting their fourth child.

Eating lunch at a downtown Chicago mall, John Jueger, a 39-year-old real estate consultant, complained that his standard of living had slipped recently as his company slashed his bonus in half and his gas bill more than doubled this winter.

Jueger, who said he paid $25,000 in taxes on a $110,000 income last year, said he could use a tax refund to help with household expenses.

"It would go right into a new fence and landscaping," he said.

But even Jueger, a die-hard Republican who likes Bush, said he could not support a tax cut if it appeared that it would add to the national debt.

"I would hate to see a big tax cut and go right back into deficit spending," he said.

But Wes Reder, a 35-year-old graphic artist who lives in Indiana and works in Chicago, said the tax cut is affordable if Congress would just cut out wasteful spending. He cited old stories about the military paying $800 for toilet seats as an example.

"Bigger and bigger government isn't the way to go," said Reder, who voted for consumer advocate Ralph Nader in the last presidential election. Reder said he is for any tax-cut proposal.

But Andy Garcia, 50, said the president reminds him of the street hustlers he grew up with in Houston.

"They had a good talk and a good walk but nothing behind it," the food-equipment salesman said. "I don't believe what he said about Social Security, Medicare or his tax cut."

Garcia doesn't believe the budget numbers add up. But he did like what Bush had to say about increasing pay, benefits, health care and housing for the troops.

The Democratic criticism that the largest chunk of the tax cut will go to those at the top appealed to some but not all voters. Several analyses have shown that the wealthiest 1 percent would get the largest share of the cut.

But others say that because wealthier people pay the most taxes, it is only fair that they get the most back.

"The top 1 percent pay the large majority of the taxes; they've got it coming," said Jeff Arden, a 47-year-old vice president of a company that manufactures cat litter in Chicago.

Aside from paying down the debt, many of those interviewed were particularly concerned about preserving Social Security. But they were split on Bush's plan to let younger people invest a portion of their payroll taxes in the private market.

"I don't want to retire and find there is no Social Security," said Karen Paschal, a Chicago accountant and Democrat who is in her 30s.

Larry Krema, a 40-year-old vice president for human resources in Chicago who voted for Bush, said that while he would be willing to consider private investment of Social Security, his father is adamantly opposed to it.

"He lived through the Depression and thinks that is the worst thing you can do," said Krema.

Albertene Barnes, a 65-year-old retired bookkeeper from Houston, said she was more interested in Bush's promise of a prescription-drug benefit than his tax-cut proposal, which she doubted would benefit her family.

Barnes listened closely to what the president had to say during his speech about creating a new prescription-drug benefit for low-income seniors.

Barnes takes seven medications to control diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, high cholesterol and insomnia. She said her $5 prescriptions are now $35 and up, and $10 ones start at $50.

"My prescriptions have more than doubled in February, and it's hard to adjust your budget when you are on a fixed income," she said. "Hopefully, I'll be able to get off some of them."

Chronicle reporters Patty Reinert, who is traveling with President Bush, Janette Rodrigues in Houston and Daphne Retter in Washington contributed to this story.

-- Anonymous, March 04, 2001