I left off last week’s article talking about legislation to curb tax evasions by United States corporations currently in Congress. The “Corporate Patriot Enforcement Act” would catch $15 billion in lost revenue over 10 years while other provisions would allow $83 billion to be spent on measures to simplify taxes while simultaneously creating 18 new loopholes to benefit big business.
However, this is only a piece of the taxes pie.
Two weeks ago the House approved a $550 billion tax cut bill, while the White House’s total proposed cut is $726 billion. But exactly who will benefit from this cut?
John Snow will. He’s the US Treasury Secretary, who could gain up to $275,000 through this cut. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is looking at $184,000, and even the Secretary of Commerce Don Evans could go home with $181,000 extra in his pocket.
Why will these powerful and influential people be receiving so much money from this tax cut? Because Bush’s plan centers around eliminating taxes on stock dividends. This would mostly benefit the top five percent of wealthy Americans. But while its supposed to be particularly beneficial for older taxpayers, in reality less than one-fourth of Americans 65 and older live in a family that receives any dividend income at all. The Fair Taxes for All coalition claims the tax cuts are “far too large, poorly designed, and highly inequitable.”
The FTFA is a broad network of organizations including labor, civil rights, affordable housing, women’s rights, health, hunger, children’s and other groups that collectively oppose the Bush tax cut plan and collectively represent over five million taxpaying Americans. Can five million people be wrong?
The Bush plan would leave 31 percent of Americans without any aid at all while slashing the tax burden of the top percentage of Americans who earn more than $1 million annually. As one supporter of the Fair Taxes For All coalition puts it, “The Bush Recession is already crushing America’s working families, and now the president wants to bury them. We need an economic recovery program designed to help those hardest hit by the downturn, not one that aids the wealthiest among us or includes tax breaks to corporations that will not create jobs or help working Americans.”
From my understanding of the tax cut plan’s logic, by cutting wealthy American’s and corporation’s taxes, that will give them more money to reinvest in the economy, hire more people and therefore give working American’s more money to spend. But I remember Bush’s first tax cut plan. Every American with a job was supposed to receive a refund check from our national surplus that has mysteriously disappeared with hardly a peep. But it didn’t disappear because Bush gave all that money back to taxpaying Americans. On the contrary, I didn’t even receive a check because my parents claimed me as a dependent on their tax return. Yet I was holding down three jobs at the time and was having taxes taken out of every one of my paychecks, just like any other taxpaying American citizen.
Next week will end this series by summarizing the themes of this series.
