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Originally Posted by OpieCunningham
I don't recall Kerry claiming he intended to repeal a tax cut for millionaires by repealing tax cuts for anyone making $200k or more. Which seems to be your argument. I'm not going to argue something that doesn't even exist.
Progressive taxation is required to assist in remedying the inherent power imbalance in our system. Sorry, but a flat tax is unfair to most for exactly the reason you most likely feel it is fair.
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Power imbalance.....are you referring to glaring disparity in U.S. wealth
distribution? Isn't 2.8 percent (a lil' under 3 percent) of all the wealth in
the country enough for the bottom 50 percent of the U.S. households?
Why should they enjoy a lower tax rate? It just isn't fair for the wealthy!
Thank God that Bush has come along to shift the total tax burden from the
wealthiest Americans on to everyone else....including the bottom 50 percent!
<center><center><img src="http://me.to/net2001.jpg">
<a href="http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html">http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html</a>
<center><center><img src="http://me.to/worth.jpg">
I also read that as recently as in 1970 the top one percent of wealth holders
only controlled 13 percent of the total U.S. wealth. Now they contol more
than 32 percent. Here's a word or two on this subject from a Princeton Univ.
economist turned nytimes.com columnists. As you can guess, not too popular
with Bush fans......
Quote:
<a href="http://www.faireconomy.org/econ/taxes/KrugmanTaxCutCon.html">5. Second Wind: The Bush Tax Cuts</a>
.........But the most original, you might say brilliant, aspect of the Bush administration's approach to tax cuts has involved the way the tax cuts themselves are structured.
David Stockman famously admitted that Reagan's middle-class tax cuts were a ''Trojan horse'' that allowed him to smuggle in what he really wanted, a cut in the top marginal rate. The Bush administration similarly follows a Trojan horse strategy, but an even cleverer one. The core measures in Bush's tax cuts benefit only the wealthy, but there are additional features that provide significant benefits to some -- but only some -- middle-class families. For example, the 2001 tax cut included a $400 child credit and also created a new 10 percent tax bracket, the so-called cutout. These measures had the effect of creating a ''sweet spot'' that could be exploited for political purposes. If a couple had multiple children, if the children were all still under 18 and if the couple's income was just high enough to allow it to take full advantage of the child credit, it could get a tax cut of as much as 4 percent of pretax income. Hence the couple with two children and an income of $40,000, receiving a tax cut of $1,600, who played such a large role in the administration's rhetoric. But while most couples have children, at any given time only a small minority of families contains two or more children under 18 -- and many of these families have income too low to take full advantage of the child tax credit. So that ''typical'' family wasn't typical at all. Last year, the actual tax break for families in the middle of the income distribution averaged $469, not $1,600.
So that's the story of the tax-cut offensive under the Bush administration: through a combination of hardball politics, deceptive budget arithmetic and systematic misrepresentation of who benefits, Bush's team has achieved a major reduction of taxes, especially for people with very high incomes.
But where does that leave the country?
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