How time flies when you're destroying progressive taxation, fabricating excuses to push the nation further into debt with trillion-dollar wars, deregulating the poor beleaguered corporations and complaining that any move to restore balance and reduce growing income inequality is unAmerican.
On the 10th anniversary of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (June 7), the first in a series of tax cuts by the Bush administration, Andrew Fieldhouse and Ethan Pollack at the Economic Policy Institute have produced a briefing paper that shows, in condensed form, the damage the cuts have caused:
1 The Bush tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy.
The Bush-era tax cuts conferred disproportionate benefits on those at the top of the earnings distribution, exacerbating a trend of widening income inequality.
• In 2010, the top 1% of earners (i.e., tax filers making over $645,000) received 38% of the breaks in the 2001-08 tax changes; 55% of the tax breaks went to the top 10% of earners (those making over $170,000).
• The top 0.1% of earners (i.e., making over $3 million) received an average tax cut of roughly $520,000, more than 450 times larger than the share received by an average middle-income family.
• A multitude of tax cuts overwhelmingly benefited the wealthiest Americans. These cuts included lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends, elimination of both the personal exemption phase-out and the limitation on itemized deductions, lower marginal rates for the top two tax brackets, and lower estate tax rates and an increase in the estate tax exemption. For instance, individuals in or below the 25% tax bracket (single-filers making less than $83,000 and joint-filers making less than $138,000) received only 16% of the benefit from reducing rates on long-term capital
gains and qualifying dividends in 2005.4 Similarly, the top 5% of earners received 100% of the benefit from partially repealing the personal exemption phase-out and the limitation on itemized deductions in 2006.
2 The Bush tax cuts did little for low-income families. ..
3 The Bush tax cuts never trickled down. ...
4 The Bush tax cuts were a poorly designed economic stimulus. ...
5 The Bush tax cuts failed to create strong long-run growth. ...
6 In the end, the Bush tax cuts cost a huge amount of money and significantly increased debt levels. ...
7 The Bush tax cuts were much more expensive than advertised. ...
8 The Bush tax cuts continue to be expensive. ...
9 The Bush tax cuts eliminated the most progressive federal tax:
taxes on large estates. ...
10 A decade of Bush tax cuts are increasing interest spending today. ...
Quite the wonderful decade if you were in the top 20 percent economically. Even better if you were in the top 10 percent. If you were in the top 1 percent, you needed a new vault. For the rest of Americans: Screw job. And one that we'll be paying the tax-cut piper for over the next several decades even if we can pressure our political leaders into reversing this massively destructive upward transfer of wealth. You can be certain they won't be doing it on their own.
