The Numbers May Be Crunching Us

By: Molly Ivins

I just love the fine print in the President's tax cut plan. I grant you, the overall effect is pretty spectacular, too - a plan that has almost no stimulative effect but still opens a future of zillion-dollar deficits to drag down the economy. That's the backasswards of what we need, but it's not the fun part.

Look at these little goodies:

• You think because you have money in the stock market you might have a stake in eliminating the dividend tax, the centerpiece of the President's tax cut - $300 billion over 10 years? (You probably think you have money in the stock market because your 401(k) keeps going down - that would be 40 million Americans.)
  
  But no! This tax break doesn't apply to your dividends! The money in your 401(k) from both savings and dividends are tax-sheltered until you withdraw the money - then all of it gets taxed as ordinary income. You don't get any tax break on your dividends - that only goes to the investor class.
  
  According to Kevin Phillips, 1% of investors pocketed 42% of the stock market gains between 1989 and 1997, while the top 10% of the population took 86%. These people need a tax cut! They haven't been getting their share!
  
  
• According to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, the effect of eliminating dividend taxation is that the average benefit for those making less than $10,000 would be $6, and the average benefit for those making more than $1 million would be $45,098. Quick, high-schoolers, let's practice up for those SAT's by figuring out by what percentage $45,098 is bigger than $6.
  
  
• President Bush also wants to accelerate the income tax cuts slated for 2006. Look at this folly. The top 5% of taxpayers would get 70% of the benefits on that one. The bottom 80% would get 6.5% of the benefits. Ditto with accelerating the 2004 tax cuts: 64.4% to the top 5% of taxpayers; 7.7% to the bottom 80%.
  
  
• Are you one of those people who can't handle numbers - need something visual to work with? Find the Urban-Brookings charts published in the Jan. 7 New York Times showing who gets how much of this tax cut. You can barely see the lines that measure the relief until you get above the 99^th percentile.
  

Naturally, there will be a lot of spinning on these tax cuts in the weeks ahead, with numbers being tossed around like confetti. We'll probably need John Paulos, the innumeracy guy, to referee. I recommend the Center for Tax Justice (www.ctj.org) - its computer model is widely respected.

Speaking of damned lies and statistics, one of the little games being played in Washington is that the Republicans want to switch to Enron accounting on the economy.

They're leaning on both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation to change the way they make their economic estimates.

According to the R's, "static scoring" - as opposed to your "dynamic scoring" - overestimates the cost of tax cuts by ignoring their role in boosting economic growth. Why, claim the R's, tax cuts pay for themselves!

If that's so, why are all the states going broke? Bring on Arthur Andersen and mark-to-market accounting - that'll perk up the economy.

The only good part of the Bush tax cut plan is the $400 increase in the tax credit per child - at least that spreads it around a little. Naturally, that's the one part of the plan that right-wingers hate.

As we all wade into these numerical battles over exactly how much of this tax cut goes to the very rich, the more fundamental question is whether it's a good idea - either economically or in terms of social justice - to have the very rich get very much richer than they already are.

Contrary to the paranoid fantasists on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, populists are not motivated by some burning resentment of the rich - we don't spend our lives in an envious funk that someone else is better off than we are.

"No skin off my nose" is the general attitude, with others coming in at "lucky them" or "good for them".

The problem is that the rich are screwing up our democracy. Less than 0.1% of the U.S. population gave 83% of all itemized campaign contributions for the 2002 elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. According to the Houston Chronicle, just 48 wealthy Texas families provided more than half the campaign funds for the major Republican state candidates this fall.

How dumb do you have to be not to be able to connect the dots here? Law, policy, and regulation are consistently shaped to favor the rich over the rest of us, and that is not fair. It is not right. It is not the country we want and for which we are asked to sacrifice.