| Income Bracket | Income Range | Population | % Tax Cut / Bush* |
| Top 1% | $383,500 - $87,000,000+ | 1.4 million | 12% |
| 95% - 99% | $162,000 - $383,500 | 5.8 million | 8% |
| 80% - 95% | $79,500 - $162,000 | 21.2 million | 8% |
| 60% - 80% | $44,500 - $79,500 | 29 million | 7% |
| 40% - 60% | $26,000 - $44,500 | 29 million | 7% |
| 20% - 40% | $13,500 - $26,000 | 30 million | 7% |
| Lowest 20% | $0 - $13,500 | 28 million | 3% |
*This originally read Tax Cut As % of Income, but when friend Amit referenced it at his group blog, Zoo Station, he bothered to grab the table from the original report, and that called my attention to the fact that this is the percentage tax deduction, not the reduction as a percentage of income. The original table contains more information, but does not change the thrust of the "reverse Robin-Hoodism" which is going on.]
And for these facts:
- The Iraq war has cost about $200 billion. By 2010, Bush's tax cuts that disproportionately favor the rich will have cost us $2 trillion. We could have ten Iraq wars for that price!
- The top one percent elite alone will get a half-trillion dollars in Bush tax cuts - enough for two Iraq wars and a second Korean war!
- The Department of Homeland Defense budget for the last three years totaled $93.2 billion - a mere 5% of the Bush tax cuts that disproportionately favor the wealthy.
5 comments:
Walker,
Add a column that shows % of tax is paid by each wage group. That might make the % reduction more meaningful
No problem reposting the table, Walker.
The tax % paid by each wage group isn't included because it makes no difference (though if you want to look at it, you'll find that the tax structure has flattened dramatically). The subject is the the Bush tax cut, and the chart illustrates who got what.
The fact that the top 1% got a tax break that's almost twice as big as everyone else's as a percentage of income, makes Bush a liar (again). He has constantly said the tax breaks favored the middle class. Even if you look a the tax cuts in dollar figures, the rich got 52% of the money.
As I said in my post, if everybody got the same percentage of tax cut, it'd be hard to complain. But that didn't happen. Bush gave the top 1% a tax break that was twice as big as the rest of us 99% got.
How come I'm not on your blog roll? :)
Now you are.
And thanks for your response to the other question. Back before Reagan we really did have a progressive taxation system (which I think IS quite defensible), but all that's left of it is these incrementing brackets, which more often than not more than compensated for by the regressive FICA tax and Capital Gains adjustments and loop holes. If one looks at the percentage of what would be "disposable income" which goes to paying taxes, then we are absolutely regressive with the lower incomes paying the most. The fact that the very lowest pay no taxes doesn't even help, because 0% of $0 is still everything.
Hey thanks for posting this chart. I see that I'm in the top 1%.
I've discovered that if look at the chart really, really close and you use the old republican spin procedure of saying "UP IS DOWN AND DOWN IS UP" enough times you'll find that you too can be in the top 1%.
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