Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [118]
In fact, less than twenty-five million Americans would be receiving a tax cut of $1,100 or more. Sixty-two million taxpayers would be getting tax cuts of less than a thousand dollars—averaging about $302. And fifty million households would get no tax cut at all.
Colmes’s next comment on that show was “Peggy [Noonan], thank you for being with us.”
Personally, I think the President, like most Americans, is smarter than Sean Hannity. So when Bush, who, after all, is President of the United States, repeatedly says something that isn’t true, it’s not confusion. It’s a lie.
Take these remarks by the President at a 2001 “Tax Family Event,” in which he introduced America to the Yahngs. Talking about his first tax plan, the President of the United States said,
It is a plan that significantly reduces taxes for people at the bottom end of the economic ladder. If you’re a family of four making $35,000, you’ll receive a one hundred percent tax cut. It’s an average tax relief for families of $1,600. The Yahng family under the plan I submit will receive actually more than that. They now pay $2,000 in taxes to the federal government. If this plan is enacted by the United States Congress, they’ll end up paying $150 of taxes.
There are actually four lies crammed into this little paragraph. Lie #1 is the “one hundred percent tax cut” part of the second sentence. The President could have told the truth by saying, “one hundred percent income tax cut.” You see, a family of four making $35,000 pays, on average, $5,355 in payroll taxes.1 Seventy-four percent of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes, so this is kind of important. Especially if you’re “at the bottom end of the economic ladder.”
Lie #2 is tricky, because the “average tax relief for families of $1,600” is technically accurate in the same way that it is accurate to say his 2003 plan would give families an average tax cut of $1,083. But in the previous sentence, he said, “if you’re a family of four making $35,000,” so I’m calling this a “sleight of hand” lie. If you don’t want to count it, fine. I respect that.
Lie #3 is “They now pay $2,000 in taxes to the federal government.” Again, he’s forgetting (or, rather, omitting) their payroll tax. Lie #4—“They’ll end up paying $150 of taxes”—comes from the same dishonest non-payroll-tax-acknowledging place in Bush’s soul.
You may remember that, during the 2000 campaign, Bush held quite a few of these Tax Family Events to deflect criticism that his plan was a giant giveaway to the wealthy.
The first few of these events with “working families” (Coulter’s “families in which no one works”) were disasters. After each one, the Gore campaign issued a press release showing how the working family would actually receive a larger cut under Gore’s plan.
After a number of embarrassments, the Bush campaign realized it needed to take greater care in choosing its families. An e-mail sent out by the campaign to New Mexico Republicans seeking such a family laid out the criteria. A suitable family must make between $35,000 and $70,000, itemize its taxes, have no children in day care, no children in college, no one attending night school, no children younger than age one, and no substantial savings outside of 401(k).
No children in college? No one in night school? No children under one? No savings? Talk about living the American dream!
These highly selective criteria eliminated 85 percent of all couples in the income range. The 85 percent would have done better under the Gore tax plan. We can fairly conclude that a “vast majority” if not “by far a vast majority” of middle-income American families of four would be paying less taxes today if Gore had been inaugurated.