An olive branch to the Dean supporters
While Factcheck.org somewhat agrees with the now infamous attack ad, it did have this to say:
"The Club for Growth ad is misleading in some ways. The "average" figure it mentions is not an average at all, but a calculation of how much repeal of the Bush cuts would cost a $40,000-a-year married couple with two children under 17. That calculation is from the Bush administration's own Office of Tax Analysis, but it's roughly in line with the figures calculated independently by the Tax Policy Center for families just above and below that income level.
Still, most families are not getting that much of a tax cut now and would not see their taxes go up that much under repeal. Roughly one in four workers get no benefit at all because they now earn too little to pay any federal income taxes at all, for example.
The ad is also misleading when it claims that Dean would "bring back the death tax." In fact, the estate tax is still on the books and won't be phased out until the year 2010 even under the Bush tax cuts. You can't "bring back" something that's not gone.
In fairness to Dean, he has promised not only to repeal Bush's cuts but also to "strive for greater tax fairness for middle class working families" through such things as closing corporate loopholes, ending "unfair tax preferences" and cracking down on tax cheats. But so far those vague promises lack any specifics -- not even a definition of "middle class" -- so it's impossible to calculate who would benefit or whether anyone would gain enough to offset what they would lose through Dean's promised repeal of cuts now on the books." Bold added
http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=113Edited to add link
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