Bush wants to make tax cuts for the rich permanent

A study conducted by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a liberal think-tank, argues that the cost of financing the array of cuts implemented by the Bush administration and Congress since 2001—including cuts in personal income tax, the repeal of the estate tax and reductions in capital gains and dividend tax—would be about $3.5 trillion over the next decade, when the cost of additional interest on federal debt is included.

The tax cuts, a wholesale looting of the federal treasury to the advantage of the rich, have been promoted by the administration as an economic boon. The CBPP report debunks claims such as “they [the tax cuts] pay for themselves,” or Bush’s assertion in November that the cuts were responsible for economic growth.

The reality is that if the tax cuts were made permanent, the top one percent of US households would receive more than $1 trillion in tax benefits in the decade from 2008 through 2017—nearly one third of the tax cuts’ total value. Households with annual incomes over $1 million, representing some 0.3 percent of the population, would receive tax cuts equaling $739 billion, or 22 percent of the total value of the tax cuts.

The bottom 60 percent of households would collect only 12 percent of the total value—less than half the amount that would go to the top one percent.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/tax-f07.shtml