Bush comfortable with the rich avoiding taxes

February 11, 2008

Following up on an earlier item, the president’s appearance on “Fox News Sunday” covered a fair amount of ground, but this exchange helped highlight so many of Bush’s flaws.

WALLACE: [In November, the Republican nominee] would be weighed down by a faltering economy, an unpopular war, at least according to the polls, and — forgive me — according to polls, an unpopular president. How does he overcome all of that and beat the Democrats?

BUSH: Because there are two big issues. One is who’s going to keep your taxes low. Most Americans feel overtaxed. And I promise you the Democrat [sic] Party is going to field a candidate that says, “I’m going to raise your taxes.”

They’re going to say, “Oh, we’re only going to tax the rich people.” But most people in America understand that, you know, rich people hire good accountants and figure out how not to, you know, necessarily pay all the taxes, and the middle class gets stuck.

I can’t help but wonder if the president appreciates how foolish this is.

On the one hand, Bush is conceding that he’s content to allow the very wealthy to “hire good accountants,” shirk their legal responsibilities, and pass along the tax burden to the middle class. If the president is convinced that the rich are able to “figure out” how not to pay their tax bill, shouldn’t he, you know, care about fixing a system in which, by his own explanation, middle-class families are getting screwed?

On the other hand, if the very wealthy are, in fact, successfully avoiding taxes, why is it the Bush administration has gone to great lengths to cut their taxes even more? In other words, as far as the president is concerned, to spur economic growth, we should cut taxes for the rich, allow them to spend more, and wait for prosperity to trickle down to everyone else. Except, to hear Bush explain it on Fox News, these people have already figured out how to beat the system.

Why, then, give tax cuts to rich people who aren’t paying their taxes to begin with? Indeed, why make that the centerpiece of the administration’s entire economic policy for more than seven years?

Keep in mind, this wasn’t just some dumb, random remark that the president uttered without forethought. On the contrary, he’s been making this exact same argument for years.

* October 2004: “[John Kerry] says, ‘Oh, I’m just going to tax the rich.’ Well, the rich hire lawyers and accountants for a reason — that’s to stick you with the tab.”

* August 2004: “[Y]ou know how the tax code works. When they say, ‘tax the rich,’ those are the folks who have got the accountants to see to it they don’t pay tax, so guess who gets stuck with the bill? You’re going to get stuck with the bill. The worst thing for job creation is to be running up the taxes on the working people of this country. And we’re not going to let [John Kerry] have a chance to do so.”

As for the Fox News interview, Chris Wallace, not surprisingly, didn’t follow up on the president’s remarks, but I have a question for Bush, and maybe some enterprising reporter could bring it up at the next White House press briefing: if the president is convinced that the rich are violating tax law, and that the middle class is getting stuck with the bill, why hasn’t he proposed doing anything about it?

There is new phrase for this behavior of allowing the powerful to have a different legal system.

It’s called “Scooter Libby Justice”

  • I can’t help but wonder if the president appreciates how foolish this is.

    He knows fully well what he’s doing. LET THEM EAT CAKE!

  • It’s also interesting to note that the IRS has cut dow on the number of auditors examining rich people’s taxes, but has increased the number of auditors who check up on those who get tax credits because they’re too poor.

    Keep on sinking the Republican’ts for us, Anchor in Chief! Maybe you can brag about how safe you kept that lockbox for us all these years, too…

  • Impeach, Try, Convict and Remove from Office, the two traitors, Bush and Cheney. Then try them both for Treason and War Crimes.

  • 1. “Shouldn’t he, you know, care about fixing a system in which, by his own explanation, middle-class families are getting screwed?”
    2. “Why, then, give tax cuts to rich people who aren’t paying their taxes to begin with?”

    Good questions. I have more:

    3. “that’s to stick you with the tab” – Don’t tax cuts drain the treasury, and tax hikes add revenue? So how do tax hikes become a “tab”?
    4. How does the middle-class get “stuck” with it? They just pay their own taxes, and their refund/payment should not be impacted by whether or not another rich person pays his share, right?

  • Steven

    Quit playing us like fools. It is a game to politicians. If you think either Democrat or Republicans give a damn about regular citizens then you are an idiot. The only thing they care about is staying in office, period.

    The only time any of these fools give a damn about “regular” people is when is benefits them.

    Do us all a favor, quit with the outrage. We know that they are liars, cheats and thieves.

    Know, back to your regular scheduled program of outrage.

  • Um, because he’s not even trying anymore? Because he just says stuff at random, and the media dutifully continues to report his words as if they’re not the demented gibbering of an alcohol damaged brain?

    Actually, Bush seems sometimes to let slip a little truth amidst his rambling falsehoods and rampant hypocrisy. The truth here is that yes, the rich barely pay much as a percentage of their incomes. The poor pay rather more, and the middle class are royally shafted (driving them ever downward into the ranks of the poor).

    Why then cut the taxes on the rich? BECAUSE THEY COULD! And because the rich were the ones buying the favors of the politicians.

    The rest of the citizenry just votes — but with a compliant media (with Faux News as the most blatant example…but the networks, CNN, MSNBC and the rest have also played their part) in selling the lies. They’re the ones who told everybody that America wanted a president who decided with his gut, not with his mind. That it was better to be mean than smart.

    Anyway, expect a ‘clarification’ in a day or two, with the White House touting the ab-so-loot-ley HEE-UGE benefits the poor and middle class got with Bush’s “trickle upon” tax policies. And the cable and network news shows will dutifully report those claims and just say something like “and the Democrats differed. Now for the latest on Britney Spears’ latest legal woes!”

    At this point, I honestly don’t know if America can ever recover from this abusive relationship with it’s so-called ‘leaders’.

  • Not only that (: Tom 🙂 @ #3, but apparently the IRS’s own numbers (sorry I don’t have a citation) indicate that auditing wealthy taxpayers has a significantly right rate of return than other tax groups, even after taking into account the more expensive and lengthy legal processes and lawyers.

  • What’s all this talk about “them”? If Bush had a shred of honesty, he would have said this:

    “[John Kerry] says, ‘Oh, I’m just going to tax the rich.’ Well, [we] hire lawyers and accountants for a reason — that’s to stick you with the tab.”

    “[Y]ou know how the tax code works. When they say, ‘tax the rich,’ [we] are the folks who have got the accountants to see to it [we] don’t pay tax, so guess who gets stuck with the bill? You’re going to get stuck with the bill. The worst thing for job creation is to be running up the taxes on the working people of this country. And we’re not going to let [John Kerry] have a chance to do so.”

  • if the president is convinced that the rich are violating tax law, and that the middle class is getting stuck with the bill, why hasn’t he proposed doing anything about it?

    Let’s be clear, Bush is not saying the rich are doing anything illegal, he’s just saying they know how to use their money to their best advantage. It’s just a variation on You Know Best How To Spend Your Money.

    The question that should be posed is what is going to be done to remove all of the advantages and loopholes that rich people have to keep from paying their fair share. Of course, the answer is nothing, the rich DESERVE the advantages and loopholes because they are rich. They EARNED it. And it’s really not fair they should have to work extra to hire those accountants.

    And the final talking point it plays into, The Government Doesn’t Work. It is so incompentent it can’t get money out of rich people, and ends up screwing the middle class and poor when it tries. Best not to even try to tax the rich.

  • The whole point of Reagan’s voodoo economics was if we stopped taxing the rich so much the economy would grow so fast that the increased revenues would make up the shortfall the tax cut caused.

    And Boy George II has made that claim for his tax cuts. But they haven’t made up the shortfall of revenue. We’ve had a couple of bumps from capital gains taxes, but nothing from increased revenue from the top income tax teir.

    And just to disprove BGII’s thesis (was that his MBA paper?), when Clinton raised the top tax rate, revenue went UP. Proving in fact that you can get money out of the bloated bodies of the grossly rich.

  • The real irony of this is that the main conservative argument for not giving refundable tax credits to the poor is that the poor don’t pay taxes. Why give an income tax break to people who don’t even pay income taxes, right? That works for rich people, too.

  • Not only are Bush and his ilk not doing anything to eliminate the loopholes, but they want to eliminate the AMT so these guys can use even more.

    But the media will not pick up on this, no one will have to re-spin it, because the TV media types really aren’t that bright. Case in point – On Charlie Rose today, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention talked about how the Dems will have an historic nominee, and that McCain should beg Condi Rice to be his running mate, since then there would be an African-American woman. Rose responded, “Richard Land, you’ve said many smart things. That’s about the smartest thing I’ve heard you say.”

  • One of the best reasons to cut taxes on the rich is that it puts lawyers and accountants out of business and that will force them to do something more productive. Virtually anything is more productive than trying to avoid or evade taxes.

    This doesn’t mean we should cut taxes but forcing me to be more productive would be a net plus for the economy.

  • The only people who bash obama as lacking policy are the Clinton Apologists grasping at straws to bash Obama.

    Obama is clearly the best candidate, Clinton is trash. And the Clinton lovers who bash Obama’s “lack of substance” are just hurting the Party.

  • No wonder the Pseudoreligiopolitical Right enjoys playing the same worn-out record about low taxes being necessary to create real (labour-intensive) jobs paying real (gold-backed) money and ensure real “economic stability” which could easily be a cover to justify hate and bigotry in the name of “defending free-market capitalism” as one with defending the “antient and pecuilar soverignty and soverign identity” of the United States.

    Not to mention implying that defending American “soverignty and soverign identity” is intertwined with that of free-market capitalism, and that the two are somehow mutually interrelated (i.e., one cannot exist without the other).

  • I think the “Scooter Libby Justice” meme is gold.

    Everyone smelled that rat as it stunk for the few news cycles that it did.

    Scooter skated, you paid, Bush laughed his ass off.

  • “…forgive me — according to polls, an unpopular president.”

    Reminds me of the time Wallace’s daddy was interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini and apologized profusely before calling him a lunatic.

  • Impeach, Try, Convict and Remove from Office, the two traitors, Bush and Cheney. Then try them both for Treason and War Crimes. — So True

    — Now the question is do we have a Congress with the backbone to perform their duty?

  • ***hot dog comment 17*** That was the last article. You’re commenting on the wrong article eh?

    Amazes me that Bush can actually say with a straight face that taxing the rich is only taxing the poor working man because the wealthy know how to get out of paying it and will just push it off on the poor.

    I tell My grand daughter that the president is trying to find ways already to make her pay for what he is doing now instead of any of us paying for it.

    These neocons wanted war and continue to want more war but refuse to pay for it. Remind me again how so many get so rich off of the war/occupation while the rest of us become so poor from it? Why aren’t they paying for it? Did any one really believe we would spend Billions and Billions on Iraq without our taxes having to be raised to pay for it? My god, the dems will raise taxes to pay for the debt the republicans caused but refused to raise taxes to pay for. See it’s all the dems fault.

  • “Why, then, give tax cuts to rich people who aren’t paying their taxes to begin with? Indeed, why make that the centerpiece of the administration’s entire economic policy for more than seven years?”
    I asked that question six years ago but no one listened to me. How many elected Dems asked It? We really really need a revolution in the D party.

  • I don’t think we’ll ever see meaningful tax reform from either party. We need to understand that the rich are in control. They make up the rules. They’re not going to raise taxes on themselves. The best we can hope for is that the Bush cuts on the rich will expire, but if the Dems use that as their starting point, by the time they get done most of the Bush cuts will remain. And I don’t believe that the Dems will even go that far – they’ll probably start out with a compromise, if they do anything at all.

    Remember, the rich control everything, including their salaries, bonuses and other forms of compensation. They’ll just raise their compensation to offset tax increases.

    They’re not going to give up their standard of living in this increasingly global economy. That’s the job of the middle class, to absorb the loss in wealth that is gradually being transferred around the world. It’s kind of like thermodynamics. In a perfectly free global economy, wealth and income of the masses will equalize eventually. The haves lose, the have nots move up toward the mean.

  • this is just the usual misdirection. it’s worked pretty well for the GOP so far, so why exactly would anyone expect them to quit now? and as misdirection goes, it’s pretty good, since it doesn’t rely on any facts, just preexisting beliefs, so it can never be disproven.

    is this particular misdirection worth further comment?

  • @21 – Now the question is do we have a Congress with the backbone to perform their duty?

    Haha. I wish.

  • It’s obvious that Bush is anti-accountant, and as a CPA (seriously, I am), I’m deeply offended and will make sure to not vote for Mr. Bush ever again. I’ve got kids to feed and if we can’t use high taxes to scare rich folks into hiring me, they might just starve to death. Thanks, President Bush!

    Seriously though, his taxcuts really were great for accountants as they made things even more complicated. Tax changes usually do, especially when they try to “simplify” the tax code. Hell, just trying to decipher how dividends are taxed would make your head spin. I’m just glad I only have small clients who don’t have these issues, or I would have just given up.

  • I heard the argument that top earners have the power to just shift any additional tax burden on to teh little people by price hikes, but then I asked myself….
    If it’s so easy to do that, why do they spend so much money to get the tax breaks?

    Why do they fight so hard if the tax hikes don’t matter?

    I smelled fertilizer.

  • Osama Bin Laden could never in his wildest dreams hope to do as much damage to the USA as Bush has done. But I believe in an America that is great–great enough even to overcome 8 years of Bush-rot. (PS – I’m a proud Canadian who’s looking forward to seeing his country resume normal relations with its neighbour to the south–once that lunatic leaves office.)

  • The answer lies in the facts:

    The bottom 50% of wage earners pay less than 10% of the total taxes.

    The top 1% pay the largest share compared to their size.

    Poor people don’t create jobs. Poor people don’t fuel the economy.

    I’m thoroughly convinced that nobody in this thread has any basic economic knowledge. Do you understand that corporations don’t pay taxes? All you Dems want to punish the corporations with higher taxes; it just hurts the middle and poor class.

    If you really want to make the tax code fair, visit http://www.fairtax.org

    Oh, and don’t write [sic] next to “Democrat Party” – that wasn’t an error in speech. The term “Democratic Party” is incorrect, Democrats belong to the Democrat party.

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