And yet, there were many other things they could have scaled back instead. The majority party isn’t exactly helpless in the face of opposition. They settled on a tax package that most closely met with their priorities, and the working poor were not part of it.
If the administration lied, then Noah lied as well. Note a relevant quote from the article:
Of course, Bush’s statement was made a month before the bill hit committee (which is where the child credit for the lowest-income families was cut). This is the lead-in statement claiming that the administration is lying, and it’s blatant spin (or lying).
Bush did not lie. Everyone who pays income tax gets relief. Payroll tax and income tax are two different things. Even the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (a liberal think tank) admits as much when analyzing this:
So they admit that the family pays no income tax, but then go off because they don’t get a bigger refund? That makes no sense. Any refund this family gets is, no matter what you call it, welfare. You can’t get a refund on taxes you don’t pay. So all the tax bill did was not allow this family to get more welfare. Play with numbers all you want, but this is the basic principle.
No, they chose to give tax relief to people who actually pay taxes. If you have an income tax liability of zero, you shouldn’t get more relief. Any “refund” you get back when you have a tax liability of zero is welfare.
But, those people pay plenty of other taxes…payroll taxes, state and local taxes. The whole Bush strategy seems to be to cut (or eliminate) the most progressive taxes [federal income tax and estate tax], do little to help the states and keep pressing further mandates on them so that they have to raise their taxes, and then claim the fact that the tax system a whole has gotten less progressive isn’t their fault!
This is probably a pretty admirable strategy from a political point of view; I just happen to find it morally reprehensible.
Come on, emarkp. You are quoting out of context to make this claim that Noah lied. He goes on to give the Republican argument that the money was cut out because they needed to lower the cost of the bill and to explain why that argument is silly.
I suggest people who want the true scoop read that full column rather than just the paraphrasing by those trying to discredit it.
The correct word here is not really “paraphrasing” but “selective quoting”.
The fact is, you can’t really cut those other taxes. If you cut payroll taxes, people would be screaming because you’d be cutting revenue from popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. Personally, I find payroll taxes to be the most reprehensible because they do hit the poorest the hardest, but their revenue is dedicated to certain programs, and unless we cut these programs (which would lead to charges of "Republicans are cutting important social programs) payroll taxes can’t be cut. Plus, Bush has no power to cut state and local taxes, so you can’t blame him for not cutting them. What the recent tax cuts did was cut income taxes for everyone who pays income taxes. I still find it very hard to believe people can get mad that people who pay no income tax did not get a further tax cut. You can’t cut taxes for someone who pays no taxes.
Furthermore, Bush didn’t force states to do any of the things which are now costing them so much. States chose, during the 90’s (before Bush was president) to start spending a lot of money in areas such as Medicaid. On a lot of Medicaid programs, state have comlete leeway on whether or not to fund them. States chose to fund them, now they don’t have the money to pay for it. It’s the states’ fault they are in their predicament. The federal government should not bail our states who spend irresponsibly.
I propose an alternative ending for that fine little parable posted above:
…Then one day, the local mobster bombed the restaraunt. The ten men agreed to fight the mobsters when they got the chance.
One of the men lost his job.
One of the men lost his government job to a contractor but got it back as a contractor with worse benefits and lower pay.
Five of them discovered that they were all working for the richest man and were helping to make him richer. In the meantime, since times were tough, the rich man had decided to reduce their benefits and pay raises in order to remain profitable.
Then one day the restaraunt owner came to the table and said, “I’ll tell you what, if you continue to eat here, I’ll let you three rich guys steal the tip money off of the other tables and keep it, and I’ll pretend like you paid that much on the bill.”
“But how will the bill get paid that way?” Asked the three wealthiest men.
“We’ll put it on your collective tab,” said the restaraunt owner with a wink, “and make everyone pay in when the bill comes due.”
“Ah,” they said, and agreed to the plan.
The other seven weren’t pleased about the deal, but they went along with it because the restaraunt owner told them they were lucky to get anything to eat at all.
Then, a few weeks later, the restaraunt owner was behind on his protection payments. The local mob boss sent four goons over to mug the patrons for the protection money. As they approached the table with the ten men, the three rich guys whispered, “these guys are going to mug us, but if we all jump them at once we can take them!”
“That would be a great idea,” said the other seven as they emptied their pockets and dropped change on the table, “except we have nothing to lose.”
And they left.
Quoting out of context??? I quoted the first two paragraphs of the article. The article’s intent is to paint the Bush administration as a pack of liars. But the statement that Bush made (and which was quoted) was correct–had the plan been implemented as Bush proposed it. He was telling the truth, and the part that everyone is objecting to was set in committee long after the statement.
The slant of the article was that Bush lied:
Title:
Meme Watch: A Unified Theory of Bush Lies?
Bush statement (as quoted above)–and in fact was the only quote from Bush even though the thesis was that Bush lies.
“That turned out not to be true.”
Are you telling me that the implication was not that Bush lied, even though that is the title of the article? Do they teach reading comprehension any more?
Oh yes, and
Thank you Oh Lord of Omniscience. I actually read the article, but I appreciate Your Worshipfulness for correcting lowly me.
:rolleyes:
Gotcha!
Two paragraphs does not a whole article make. The point of the article is to follow through the convoluted logic of Bush and the Republicans as they try to justify why the final bill did not have tax cuts for all who pay income taxes.
Like I said, I am perfectly happy to have others read the whole article and decide for themselves if Noah lied.
Well, there are two ways you could cut payroll taxes: One is the idea of a “payroll tax holiday” where the payroll taxes paid by workers is temporarily reduced with the difference being made up by the government. Another advantage of this is that it is temporary so you get stimulus when you need it and accompanying deficits when you must run them, but then you don’t end up with a fiscal train wreck and hampering the government far into the future.
Another idea would be to raise the earned-income tax credit which is, as I understand it, sort of a rebate on some of the payroll taxes paid if you are poor enough to qualify.
Even if you really insist on cutting income taxes, you can cut them more progressively by cutting only the bottom brackets. This gives everyone who pays taxes something but the maximum amount one can get is capped, so you have the highest-earning 1%, who have done splendidly well in raising their after-tax income in the last 20 years (and weren’t doing so badly before that!), not getting much more than a 1% share of the total money in the tax cut.
And, yes, I know that Bush can’t cut state taxes but he can take the entire tax structure into account when looking at whose taxes to cut. I.e., he can say, “Sure the wealthy pay most of the federal income tax, which is the most progressive tax we’ve got now that I’ve killed the estate tax. But, when you look at tax burdens as a whole, they are pretty flat. So, it behooves me not to make them more regressive…particularly when I look at our economy over the past 20 or so years and see who has made huge gains and who has been largely left behind. Besides which, cutting the taxes of those who will spend the money immediately is the fastest way to inject money into the economy and get it moving again. It is silly to throw money at investors hoping they will invest more when they don’t see the demand there to prompt their investment. And, of course, most of the money injected into the economy in this way will eventually percolate up to the ‘investment class’ anyway since they are the ones that have most of the money in our economy. In the meantime, by putting it in at the bottom, we’ve stimulated demand and we’ve helped out those who need it most.”
Now that sounds Presidential to me!!
Interesting thread. I have little new to add to the debate, but y’all might find a better reference than a secondary source:
http://www.irs.ustreas.gov/pub/irs-soi/00in01rt.xls
This Excel spreadsheet gives the number of returns, cumulative AGI’s, AGI floors (nominal and constant), and total income tax share per percentiles (top 1%, 5%, 10%, 25%, 50%) for each of the past 15 years. Given that it is from the IRS itself, it might help reduce charges of “biased source!” that are common in these discussions.
“find the following a better reference…” :rolleyes:
I’d like to access that information but the link isn’t working for me.
My ‘puter says that the file does not begin with `%PDF-’
The link worked fine for me, FYI.
Good stuff, too!
Apparently, the concept of “turned out not to be true” wasn’t taught in your reading comprehension class, being as it refers to the future, not the time when the statement was made.
It’s sort of odd that the EITC, which was one of the best ideas of the Regan administration, and loudy decried by liberals for being a ploy to replace welfare (which it WAS, and a very GOOD replacement for many many cases), is now suddenly the rhetorical whipping boy of Republicans.
It’s also rather unlikely that the rather small marginal rate cuts are going to have much effect on work effort. Americans are just not all that sensitive to minor changes, as almost all of them have career paths that demand certain input of time to get the job at all: it’s lumpy, not continuous. Regan had ridiculously high marginal rates to work with (in the top brackets especially), most notably rates way over 50%. But since the rates are well below 50% now, and most economists find little effect on work effort of, especially, minor rate changes, below that level, I’m not sure why the administration thinks these cuts are really going to spur the economy as drastically as they seem to be promising.
If you are using a PC and a two-button mouse, right-click on the link and “Save Target As…” to your computer. It is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, but can probably be opened in other formats (as long as you have the filters and converters installed).
If they aren’t paying federal taxes, though, why on earth would the federal tax refund have anything to do with them? If you’re advocating they pay too much in other taxes (which I agree with, especially local taxes) wouldn’t the fair thing to be to lobby for tax refunds from the institutions they paid into? It doesn’t make sense for an institution that didn’t collect the money from them to be held responsible for returning the “excess”, not even bookies work that way.