President Bush has been getting a bum rap from those who say he is insensitive to minorities. His new stimulus package shows how much he loves one minority in particular: the rich.
And anybody who says different is some sort of player-hater engaged in political “class warfare.”
He said as much during a tour of his lovely ranch in Crawford, Texas, earlier this month. “I understand the politics of economic stimulus–some would like to turn this into class warfare,” Bush explained.
Not me. I love rich people. I don’t even mind when they move next door to me. They help my property value go up.
So I had to admire Bush’s bold defense of this put-upon minority when he unveiled his economic stimulus plan in Chicago Tuesday. He even managed to spin it so that it sounded like an anti-poverty program for the elderly.
“About half of all dividend income goes to America’s seniors, and they often rely on those checks for a steady source of income in their retirement,” he said. “For the good of our senior citizens … I’m asking the United States Congress to abolish the double taxation of dividends.”
Now, if you think for a hot second that the president was talking about sad, old, poor folks eating out of cans in unlit apartments, forget it. Nearly 40 percent of Bush’s tax-cut benefits to seniors would go to the 2.5 percent of elderly individuals who have incomes above $200,000, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington-based think tank. And almost three-fourths would go to the 19 percent who have incomes above $75,000.
And for younger folks? The administration boasts that two-thirds of Bush’s proposed tax cuts are in the middle- to lower-income brackets in the form of a reduced marriage penalty, changes in the alternative minimum tax and a $400 increase in the per-child tax credit. Ah, but those proposed middle-class tax cuts are really a temporary benefit in the sense that they simply accelerate tax cuts that already have been enacted.
Meanwhile, Bush’s centerpiece proposal, the elimination of taxes on corporate dividends paid out to individuals, would be permanent and a boon to upper-bracket earners.
The Citizens for Tax Justice, another Washington think tank, says less than 10 percent of Bush’s proposed $300 billion abolition of taxes on dividends would go to the four-out-of-five households that earn less than $73,000 a year, while half would go to those earning more than $350,000 a year, the top-earning 1 percent of Americans.
One percent? Hey, there’s a minority for you.
And that’s OK, the president assures us, since his proposed tax cut is almost exactly proportional in each tax bracket to the taxes that we paid in. The rich should get most of the tax cut, since they pay most of the taxes.
It takes boldness, even courage, to make that argument in a land that long has cherished the notion that the rich should pay more taxes since they make more money.
That old “bubble-up” economic view, as opposed to the “trickle-down” theory, held that tax breaks for the poor helped to lift them out of poverty, support their families, boost their communities and help everybody.
Besides, it was widely reasoned, people with the lower income already pay a heavier share of sales taxes and payroll taxes, like Social Security.
But, alas, that share is not heavy enough in the eyes of an apparently growing movement to tax the poor even more and the rich less.
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On Dec. 16, The Washington Post reported that the Bush administration was exploring various ways to even out what administration officials see “as a rising tax burden on the rich and a declining burden on the poor.”
“You can’t maintain a democracy if the people who are voting don’t care what their government costs,” said Rep. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who’s been pushing the idea of shifting the tax burden down the income brackets for the past two years.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, an important party-line provider in conservative circles, picked up that drumbeat in a Nov. 20 editorial headlined “The non-taxpaying class.” Yes, talk of lazy poor people is back for the first time since welfare reform passed in 1996, except this time it is not welfare recipients but the working poor who are being dissed for allegedly not pulling their share of the nation’s economic load.
Under the old thinking, tax breaks like the Earned Income Tax Credit to lower-income earners were a good thing. They lifted working families out of poverty. They helped welfare reform to work by “making work pay,” as the Clinton administration used to say. They fed money back into the economy quickly, since poor people are more likely to spend every cent of their tax break, not send it to an offshore bank.
But that kind of thinking is old hat to some folks. The new thinking goes something like this: “Tax the poor. They didn’t vote for us anyway.”
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