{"id":2330,"date":"2004-08-13T10:58:54","date_gmt":"2004-08-13T15:58:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/2330.html"},"modified":"2004-08-13T10:58:54","modified_gmt":"2004-08-13T15:58:54","slug":"al-gore-was-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/al-gore-was-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Al Gore was right"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Bush told his supporters<\/a> this week that “real rich people figure out how to dodge taxes,” he wasn’t kidding. But it’s not so much a “dodge,” as it is intentional White House tax policies that give millionaires a windfall.<\/p>\n

To give credit where credit is due, Al Gore did warn us. Four years ago, Gore did everything he could to explain that Bush’s policies would offer lavish benefits on “the top 1 percent,” create huge deficits, and leave the middle class squeezed.<\/p>\n

Anyone who’s been paying even passive attention to current events the last fours years should realize Gore was right, but now we have a new report<\/a> from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office that bolsters the arguments Dems have been making all along.<\/p>\n

Since 2001, President Bush’s tax cuts have shifted federal tax payments from the richest Americans to a wide swath of middle-class families, the Congressional Budget Office has found, a conclusion likely to roil the presidential election campaign.<\/p>\n

The CBO study, due to be released today, found that the wealthiest 20 percent, whose incomes averaged $182,700 in 2001, saw their share of federal taxes drop from 64.4 percent of total tax payments in 2001 to 63.5 percent this year. The top 1 percent, earning $1.1 million, saw their share fall to 20.1 percent of the total, from 22.2 percent.<\/p>\n

Over that same period, taxpayers with incomes from around $51,500 to around $75,600 saw their share of federal tax payments increase. Households earning around $75,600 saw their tax burden jump the most, from 18.7 percent of all taxes to 19.5 percent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n


\nAnd please don’t let anyone tell you that this research somehow suffered from a partisan slant.<\/p>\n

“CBO is nonpartisan, it’s independent, and right now it works for a Republican Congress with a former Bush economist at its head,” said Jason Furman, economic director of the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). “There’s no higher authority on the subject.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Paul Krugman said<\/a> today, “The Bush tax cuts have, of course, heavily favored the very, very well off.” If anything, he was understating the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Bush told his supporters this week that “real rich people figure out how to dodge taxes,” he wasn’t kidding. But it’s not so much a “dodge,” as it is intentional White House tax policies that give millionaires a windfall. To give credit where credit is due, Al Gore did warn us. Four years ago, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}