Class Warfare
President Bush has spent the week campaining for the 2004 election. Oops, I meant to say that he has spent the week stumping for a government give away to the rich. Or, as he put it “an economic stimulus plan big enough to help people who are looking for work, a plan big enough to encourage economic growth.” I’m not sure how a dividend tax cut will put people back to work, but hey, he was on a role. Check out the full speech here. Organized labor has not been impressed. Here is what the United Steel Workers of America say about the president’s tax cuts:
“Since President Bush signed his so-called ‘job creating’ tax cut in June 2001, the economy has lost 1.8 million jobs. Yet the debate in Washington today is not about freezing the tax cuts that are adding to the damage, it’s about how much more to cut them. The precipitous decline in manufacturing jobs is undermining public revenues at precisely the same time that they’re being undermined by the Administration’s tax-cutting obsession. At this rate, we’ll have the first president since Herbert Hoover to rack up a net loss of jobs over the course of his entire term.”
As the Washington Post notes, the beneficiaries of the tax-cut are the wealthiest Americans:
“[T]he president’s original $726 billion tax cut plan — and the smaller versions that passed the House and are under consideration in the Senate — clearly do favor the affluent.
Under Bush’s original proposal, households with $40,000 to $50,000 in taxable income would receive an average tax cut of $482 and a boost of 1.2 percent to their total after-tax income. For households earning more than $1 million, the average tax cut would be more than $89,500, with an increase in their after-tax income of 4.2 percent, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
The $550 billion version that passed the House last week is even more skewed. Those same middle-income households would receive a tax cut of $452 and an income boost of 1.1 percent, while millionaires would receive a cut of $93,537, enough to increase their after-tax income by 4.4 percent. The more modest $350 billion tax cut that passed the Senate Finance Committee last week would trim the average millionaire’s tax cut a bit, to $64,431. But it would also trim the middle class cut to $415.”
Any criticism of this give-away to the rich has been labeled “class warfare” by the administration. Good politics for now. Bad politics when people realize that while the wealthy are getting tax cuts, unemployment is at 6 percent and Bush will be the first president since Hoover to preside over a job-losing economy.
The Class Warfare by SharedThought, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.