If true, that’s a damning statement for tax-happy Bush & Co. Most experts, even those who think the rich made out like bandits with Bush’s two tax cuts, will tell you that everyone’s federal taxes have gone down. I figured the Kerry campaign would have a stack of documents to back up such a dramatic claim. But my early queries made it clear that his campaign is running much more off the cuff than I thought. After I tracked the quote down for the campaign, they tried to translate Kerry: “I believe he is saying the middle class pays a greater proportion of overall taxes than before George W.,” press secretary Robert Gibbs explained.
I didn’t know what to believe, so I asked Bob McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice, a left-leaning group. “That’s true. You could say that when the cuts are phased in, that the middle class will pay a higher share of the total,” he explained. According to his calculations, the richest would go from assuming 39 percent of the total tax burden to 35 percent, and the vast middle would go from 60 percent to 64 percent. But those calculations are based on projected 2010 figures and ignore the sunset provisions (that means the tax cuts will expire).
Let the number-spinning begin. Next, I went to the other side of the political spectrum and asked the Tax Foundation’s Bill Ahern. He scoffed when I threw McIntyre’s 2010 figures at him. Then he asked me a stumper: does this hypothetical middle-class person who is supposedly paying more now have children? “If you are talking about middle-class families with children, it absolutely does not hold water that they pay proportionally more,” Ahern says, explaining that under Bush’s tax cuts, married couples with kids not only got a child tax credit but a big reduction in the so-called marriage penalty.
But before I could ask the Kerry camp just who the senator had in mind as his “average American,” word came back from Gibbs that he had gotten to the bottom of things. It seems that the senator was talking about state taxes. According to a study of seven states by the Progressive Policy Institute, the combination of new state taxes–and tuition increases–have gone up more than federal taxes have gone down for the middle class. Kerry’s comment was misleading, but at least in seven states according to one think tank study, it was true.
The spinning on tax cuts promises to give all of us whiplash by election time. President Bush is playing a game of chicken with the economy. Despite appointing a new jobs czar this week, his real plan is to wait out the economy and hope that what his advisors say is right: that tax cuts will stimulate job growth. Democrats are divided on whether they believe in them in the first place. Front runner Howard Dean is vowing to repeal all of Bush’s tax cuts. Meanwhile, Kerry wants to keep the tax cuts–child credits, etc.–that help the middle class most. Democrats argue that the rich got the biggest windfall under Bush’s tax breaks. But the Bush administration replies that wealthy people actually assume more of the overall tax burden under the president’s plan. Doing a little number crunching, both seem to be true. But then, even statistics are subjective in Washington.
