The update is at the bottom of the page.

The graph on the front page of today's (1/8/03) paper about Bush's proposed tax cuts was very interesting. I was going to write about the lack of statistics for those who made less than $50,000 or more than $250,000, but as I did the math from the few figures given I came up with something entirely more interesting.

Using the figures in the graph for the accelerated tax cut, I changed the numbers into "percent of your income that is no longer taxed". Most of us are used to thinking of taxes this way; I, for example, estimate my total tax burden as around 30% of my paycheck.

With Bush's accelerated tax cut, someone making $50,000 a year would get back $50, or one tenth of a percent (0.01%) of their earned income. On the other hand, according to your table, someone making $250,000 a year would get back a percent and a half of their earned income - or just over $4,000.

I know that math can be boring, but let's do one more calculation. Let's translate that percentage back into real dollars. If you made $50,000 - and got the same *percent* tax cut as someone making $250,000, you wouldn't get a measly $50 tax break.

You'd get $750.

Who really benefits from Bush's proposed tax cut? You do the math.

UPDATE

So now it's 11/25/05, almost three years later. Bush's tax cut was classic supply-side economics (popularized as "Reaganomics" during the 80's). Let's look and see if the tax cuts were successful in promoting business by, say, looking at jobs in the United States.

While the rate of job loss might have slowed a little bit (with a small positive blip in early 2004), that's like saying the arterial bleeding has slowed a little - but not stopped. If these tax cuts did what they claimed, or had as much effect as they were supposed to, then we would have seen the rate of job loss drop to zero.

Personally, I think that there's other factors (primarily outsourcing) that play a bigger role - but look at it this way: Why make the tax cuts such a big priority and claim they'll fix things they won't - instead of addressing the real problems?