When Bush debated Gore in 2000, he said of his tax cuts that "by far the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder."
That was a very big lie. A few weeks after the debate the media-watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, noted that "according to Congress' bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, households making less than $40,000 -- roughly the bottom half of the economic ladder -- would receive only 10 percent of Bush's income tax cut."
Tonight, when Bush stated that "most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans," it still wasn't true. That's because, in 2004, the richest one percent of Americans received a larger share of Bush's total tax cuts than the bottom 60 percent did. And because 70 percent of the "middle class tax cut" the senate passed last month goes the top 20 percent of Americans.
In fact, the statement gets less true every year. Bush's tax cuts were designed to give a progressively larger share of the cuts to ultra-wealthy, until by 2010 the top 1 percent of the population gets over half.
Bush got a free pass on his claim in 2000; let's see if the media does any better catching him the second time around.
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