BUSH'S #1 PRIORITY FOR A TROUBLED NATION: MORE TAX CUTS FOR THE WEALTHY

Congressional Republicans race to extend Bush's deep tax cuts for the uber-rich. So they can raise the deficit, reduce tax revenues, and benefit the wealthiest Americans. But hey! We can make up a tiny bit of the difference by slashing programs that benefit the working poor and middle-class.

Critics maintain that those tax cuts have overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, while budget cuts target programs for the poor to close a deficit created largely by tax cuts totaling nearly $2 trillion since Bush took office.

Middle-income households would receive an average tax cut of $20 from the agreement, according to the joint Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, while 0.02 percent of households with incomes over $1 million would receive average tax cuts of $42,000. [emphasis mine]
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Some economists say the timing of those gains was coincidental. "You might credit the cuts with providing a little bit of a jump-start. But I think the main reason the economy has done so well the last couple of years has nothing to do with tax policy, and more to do with the corporate sector starting to spend some of their record profits," said Ethan Harris, chief U.S. economist of the Lehman Brothers investment bank.

"We had very good markets in the '90s, before all these tax cuts went into effect," said former Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin.
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And measured against the size of the economy, tax revenue remains well below where it stood before Bush began cutting taxes. In 2000, federal tax receipts equaled 20.9 percent of the gross domestic product. They fell to 16.3 percent of the GDP in 2004 before recovering to a projected 17.7 percent this year.

Tags: Republican tax cuts benefit wealthy, $70 billion