Wait, what? Oh right, Matt Santos was fictional. But he (well, really the writers who created him) had a good idea: "I won't support any tax plan that can't be figured out on an Excel spreadsheet".
President Bush has a different idea though. He would like Congress to act and make the tax cuts from his first term permanent (they are set to expire in 2010). In his state of the union, President Bush told us that if the tax cuts are not made permanent, 116 million Americans would see their taxes rise by $1,800.
$1,800??? That's enough money to buy the new MacBook Air. Or a few Nintendo Wiis. Or pay off my credit card. I can't afford for the government to take $1,800 away from me. But then I thought more about it. I, like most recent college graduates, make just enough money to pay rent and student loans and keep my closet well-stocked with H&M's latest lines. Taxes in this country are progressive, so if the average American taxpayer will see their taxes raised $1,800, I surely would be on the lower end of that scale.
According to this article in Newsweek, the (non-partisan) Tax Policy Center calculates that very few Americans would see their taxes go up by $1,800 dollars:
It is true that taxes would go up compared with what people pay now should all the tax cuts enacted from 2001 through 2006 be allowed to expire on the schedule Congress originally set. The independent, nonpartisan Tax Policy Center calculates the average increase at $1,713, not much different from Bush's figure.
But the average increase would not be typical. The increase would be far smaller, $828, for those in the middle 20 percent of the income scale, with earnings between $27,465 and $48,165 a year in today's dollars. And of course, the increase would be lower still for those with lower incomes. Even for the next-highest 20 percent, with incomes between $48,165 and $85,706, the increase would be $1,309, still well below Bush's "average" figure. But for the top 1 percent, with incomes over $434,766, the tax increase would be $64,154. That's what pulls up the average to well above what ordinary taxpayers would experience.
And of course, Bush fails to mention that Democrats don't propose allowing all his tax cuts expire and generally propose cuts for "middle class" taxpayers.
So as usual, President Bush is taking a worse case scenario and using it to scare voters into thinking that their lifestyles will drastically change if the Democrats take over and the tax cuts are allowed to expire. But looking around, I think that most average American's lifestyles have changed in the past few months. Many Americans have mortgages, and their interest rates are riding so high that they can't pay. Many Americans work, but the job market has stagnated under President Bush. President Bush has had seven years to fix the country, but rather he has given us a failing economy, a dire housing and mortgage situation, and the President's current tax plans won't help.
According to Einstein, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Hopefully, average Americans will restore some sanity to the presidency.