June 03, 2003
Tax Cuts—another view

Considering how the major media (ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, Time, Newsweek, and most newspapers) have (predictably) lined up against tax cuts, and bolstered their arguments with citations from the DNC, CBPP, and other left-leaning groups, it is nice to find a site that uses facts to show the other side of the debate. From Tax Foundation, a few facts that the major media fail to report:

Tax Foundation economists estimate that should the Bush plan be enacted, it would increase the number of tax filers with a zero tax liability by 3.8 million, to 39.5 million. Of these new zero tax filers, 3 million are families who are taken off the tax rolls because of the expansion of the child credit from $600 to $1,000 per child. Because of the large number of dependent children claimed on these returns, the total number of people represented by returns with zero tax liability will rise from 69.6 million, to 82 million, an increase of more than 12 million people.
...
The bottom line is that it is impossible to give income tax relief to people who do not pay income taxes. Unfortunately, when Congress’s Joint Tax Committee, or economists at Washington think tanks, calculate the distributional impact of the President’s plan on "taxpayers," they do so on the entire universe of 133 million tax filers – including the 36 million who do not have a tax liability.
If distributional analysis is to be the standard by which Washington judges the benefits of any tax plan, then the only honest way to do this is to calculate the plan’s benefits to taxpayers, meaning those filers who have a positive income tax liability.
posted on June 03, 2003 09:55 PM



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