The Times chart made me nostalgic. I remembered the days of the 2000 campaign, when Bush claimed, "The vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum." It wasn't true then. And it's not true now.
The top .1 percent of taxpayers--145,000 taxpayers--receive 15.2 percent of all these tax cuts. (These folks make over $1.6 million a year). The top 1 percent--1.4 million taxpayers who bag over $383,000 a year--pocket 30.6 percent of the trillions of dollars in so-called "tax relief." (Is it "relief" when you give millionaires $100,000 or more each year in tax cuts?)Looking at the other end of the ladder, we see that the bottom 60 percent--those 87 million people making less than $44,000 a year collect 15.1 percent of Bush's tax cuts, averaging a little over $300 a year in annual tax savings.
So, 1.1% of the richest bag 45.8% of the tax cuts, while the bulk of us regular folk get a measly 15.1% of the tax cuts. Read more courtesy of David Corn.
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From Bob Herbert's New York Times column, on the widening gap between rich & poor:
"For every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent of the population between 1950 and 1970, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162. That gap has since skyrocketed. For every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent between 1990 and 2002.. each taxpayer in that top bracket brought in an extra $18,000.
It's like chasing a speedboat with a rowboat."
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