Bush's CBO delivers treat for Kerry (will * RNCtax ideas be scored fairly

[papau]

Everybody expects that Bush at Madison Square Garden will propose tax reform. But will the details be scored by the Congressional Budget Office in language that warriors in the class struggle can use?"

http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/cst-edt-novak19.html


Bush's CBO director delivers treat for Kerry

August 19, 2004

BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Early on Thursday morning last week, Republican congressional staffers began receiving telephone calls from journalists asking about the new report from the Congressional Budget Office. Their immediate reaction: What report? It was news to them that the CBO for the past three months had been working on a study that would provide valuable ammunition for Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign.

That study concluded that President Bush's cuts had shifted more of the tax burden from the nation's rich to the middle class, though everyone enjoyed an income tax reduction. That was the old-fashioned way of scoring consequences of tax legislation, an exercise of arithmetic rather than economics.

Kerry could not have been happier. ''This is the straw that will break the back of middle-class families,'' proclaimed a written statement by the senator.

In the opinion of supply-siders, the CBO long has been an accident waiting to happen. While it is defined by statute as nonpartisan, the agency in a Republican-controlled Congress with a former Bush White House staffer as its director is not obliged to produce political fodder for Democrats. Beyond political naivete, its economic worldview is no help to George W. Bush's economics.<snip>

[ComradeOgilvy]

1. I debated this report at a conservative blog

They asserted the CBO reported showed the wealthy were paying more of the tax burden, for only income taxes that was true after I looked at the report. But they never cited the figures and tried to argue with me by looking at the tax brackets instead, they were really dumb. However the total share of federal taxes shifted to the middle class from the rich, and the Top 1 percent's total federal tax rate went down the most of any other group. Bush's three tax cuts affected more than income taxes anyway.