The rich and the stupid have cheered loudly upon news of Bush‘s latest round of suggested tax cuts, with which he promised that “ninety-two million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money.” The rich like it because they know what the stupid do not: three-fifths of the money goes to the top 10% of taxpayers. In fact, the middle 20% of taxpayers (income $29,000 – $46,000) would see just a $256-289 reduction. The next quintile (60-80%; those who make up to $77,000) would see a savings of $574-657.

The figure put forth by Bush (who will save $44,000) and Cheney ($327,000) may be technically correct, “but only in the sense that it is also true that if Bill Gates happened to drop by a homeless shelter where a couple of nuns were serving soup to sixty down-and-outers dressed in rags, the average person in the room would have a net worth of a billion dollars. Average, yes; typical, no.” (from The New Yorker) Small wonder the Financial Times, that left-leaning rag, called the claim “obviously bogus.” The honest approach, as anyone with even a tiny amount of statistics will tell you, is to use the median. But I guess it’s not as impressive to talk about savings of not even three hundred bucks.

Learn more. Spinsanity takes on the Bush deception campaign in Taxing the public’s trust, which contains links to PDF tables from Citizens for Tax Justice (table) and the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (table.) Also try Not your ordinary averages, which details the myth of the $1,000 check being spread by new majority leader.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 28th, 2003 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Law & Politics.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.