More Taxing News for Humans

Bush's cuts? You'll feel the pain

A grim update from, once again, the really good bad-news bearers at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Scrambling to crunch the numbers, the center has recalculated the impact of George W. Bush's tax cuts. The new news is even worse.

Here's an excerpt from the center's reconfigured report analyzing an August report by the Congressional Budget Office:

The top one percent will gain by far the most from the tax cuts even though it has already been the main beneficiary of income trends since the 1970s. Data from a separate CBO study, released in April of this year, indicate that between 1979 and 2001 (the latest year CBO examined), the average after-tax income of the top one percent of households rose by a stunning $409,000, or 139 percent, after adjusting for inflation.[1] This dwarfed the $6,300, or 17 percent, average increase among the middle fifth of the population, over this 22-year period, and the $1,100, or 8 percent, increase among the bottom fifth of the population.

Added to that not-quite-old news is that the center's revised report also notes that "the Economic Policy Institute finds that the number of jobs created in the wake of the tax cuts has already fallen 2.7 million jobs short of Administration predictions made in 2003."

And what about this Economic Policy Institute, which the center so graciously credits? Just today, it released a report by Elise Gould entitled "Employer-Provided Health Insurance Falls for Third Consecutive Year." Yes, we're talking about what the report calls a "widespread loss of coverage."