Posted on 05/09/2003 11:39:11 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:09:45 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
WASHINGTON -- The family of President Kennedy objected yesterday to the use of his name or image in ads touting President Bush's tax cut package. The late president's brother, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, said the ads were ''politically irresponsible and grossly inaccurate,'' and called on the Club for Growth, a tax-cut advocacy group, to take them off the air.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
[snip]
In an early message, I shall propose a permanent reduction in tax rates which will lower liabilities by $13.5 billion. Of this, $11 billion results from reducing individual tax rates, which now range between 20 and 91 percent, to a more sensible range of 14 to 65 percent, with a split in the present first bracket. Two and one-half billion dollars results from reducing corporate tax rates, from 52 percent - which gives the Government today a majority interest in profits - to the permanent pre-Korean level of 47 percent. This is in addition to the more than $2 billion cut in corporate tax liabilities resulting from last year's investment credit and depreciation reform.
To achieve this reduction within the limits of a manageable budgetary deficit, I urge: first, that these cuts be phased over 3 calendar years, beginning in 1963 with a cut of some $6 billion at annual rates; second, that these reductions be coupled with selected structural changes, beginning in 1964, which will broaden the tax base, end unfair or unnecessary preferences, remove or lighten certain hardships, and in the net offset some $3.5 billion of the revenue loss; and third, that budgetary receipts at the outset be increased by $1.5 billion a year, without any change in tax liabilities, by gradually shifting the tax payments of large corporations to a more current time schedule. This combined program, by increasing the amount of our national income, will in time result in still higher Federal revenues. It is a fiscally responsible program - the surest and the soundest way of achieving in time a balanced budget in a balanced full employment economy.
This net reduction in tax liabilities of $10 billion will increase the purchasing power of American families and business enterprises in every tax bracket, with greatest increase going to our low-income consumers. It will, in addition, encourage the initiative and risk-taking on which our free system depends - induce more investment, production, and capacity use - help provide the 2 million new jobs we need every year - and reinforce the American principle of additional reward for additional effort.
I do not say that a measure for tax reduction and reform is the only way to achieve these goals.
The same thing happened again with the Reagan tax cut and the DIM o Crats spent the next twenty years increasing federal spending to prevent the masses from realizing that the cuts had caused such an effect!
Both parts of this statement are UNTRUE, of course a gimmie said it, so what's new? Lies, half-truths, and moral equivilence are all run of the mill, for this bunch of socialist/marxists.
Monday, March 19, 2001 Kennedy Tax Cut Helped the Rich
In recent days, backers of George W. Bush's proposed tax rate reduction have been running advertisements featuring John F. Kennedy supporting his 1963 tax cut. This has brought forth a predictable response from the Kennedy family, which has denounced the ads and argue that Kennedy would oppose the Bush plan were he still alive. That may or may not be true. But what is indisputable is that the Kennedy tax cut, enacted in 1964 after his death, was as much of a tax cut for the rich as Bush's.
In his tax message to Congress in 1963, Kennedy asked that the top income tax rate be brought down from 91 percent to 65 percent. His goal was to reduce all statutory income tax rates by about 30 percent, including a reduction in the bottom tax rate from 20 percent to 14 percent. Subsequently, Congress only reduced the top rate to 70 percent. Nevertheless, this constitutes a significantly larger tax cut than Bush's proposal to bring the top rate down from 39.6 percent to 33 percent. The law passed by a Democratic Congress in 1964 lowered the top rate by 23 percent, while Bush's plan would only lower it by 17 percent.
Looking at how the tax cut affected people at different income levels, the largest reduction in taxes went to those with adjusted gross incomes between $50,000 and $100,000. That is equivalent to an income of $300,000 to $600,000 today. People in this bracket got a tax cut equal to 4.3 percent of their income. Those at the top of the income distribution, with incomes over $1 million, equal to $6 million today, got a tax cut of 3 percent. By contrast, those at the bottom of the distribution, with incomes below $5,000, saved only 2.5 percent.
Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who was elected to his brother's Senate seat in 1962, twice voted in favor of lowering the top income tax rate from 91 percent to 70 percent in 1964. He and President Kennedy's daughter Caroline now charge that the Kennedy tax cut was less tilted toward the wealthy than is Bush's. They say this: "Only 6 percent of President Kennedy's tax cut went to those earning over $300,000 in today's dollars. The Bush tax cut gives them seven times that amount, an irresponsible 43 percent."
It is true that those with incomes above $300,000 in today's dollars got about 6 percent of the total Kennedy tax cut. However, the analogy to the Bush plan is not valid.
What the Kennedys are trying to do is equate the top 1 percent of taxpayers today with the top 1 percent in 1962. But they have made a mistake in assuming that incomes are distributed the same way today as they were in 1962. Today, an income over $300,000 in adjusted gross income would put someone into the top 1 percent. The equivalent income of $50,000 in 1962, however, put one into just the top 0.2 percent; that is, the top two-tenths of 1 percent. To be in the top 1 percent in 1962, one only needed an income of $25,000. Those with incomes above this level got 14 percent of the Kennedy tax cut.
Moreover, the comparison that the Kennedys are making to the Bush tax cut is flawed for several reasons. First, the 43 percent figure (actually 45 percent) comes from a leftist group called Citizens for Tax Justice that uses a definition of income different from that upon which the Kennedy tax cut figures are based. Under CTJ's definition of income, one needs $373,000 to get into the top 1 percent.
CTJ also includes in its analysis the estate tax. They treat it as if it is paid annually out of one's income, rather than from assets at death. Since Bush plans to abolish the so-called death tax, this makes the tax cut for the wealthy seem much bigger than it actually is. A recent Treasury Department analysis of the Bush tax bill, using a definition of income comparable to those for the Kennedy tax cut and excluding the estate tax, found that 25.4 percent of the benefits would go to those with incomes above $200,000. Since this is an income level below the cutoff for the top 1 percent, the benefits for this group would be less.
Thus an honest comparison between the Kennedy and Bush tax cuts would conclude that they are more alike than the Kennedy family would like to believe. The share of the Bush tax cut going to the top 1 percent is about 21 percent--50 percent larger than this group got under the Kennedy tax cut, but nowhere near the 7 times larger that the Kennedy family charges.
The important point here is that once upon a time, in the not-too-distant past, there was a Democratic president who was not obsessed with class warfare, as today's Democrats are. He was willing to cut tax rates for all taxpayers, including those at the very top of the income distribution. Today's Democrats don't actually want to cut taxes at all. They only want to send out government checks to people who don't pay income taxes and call them tax cuts, while denying tax relief to those who pay the vast bulk of the federal government's bills.
As recently as 1981, there were still Democrats around who thought like John F. Kennedy. One was a congressman from Detroit, Michigan named William Brodhead. Although a self-professed liberal, backed by organized labor, he argued that Ronald Reagan was mistaken to phase-in his reduction in the top tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent, because the people affected by the top rate are those who make the investments that create the jobs. Said Brodhead, "We have to reduce taxes on wealthy people to have more investment."
With polls showing strong support for a tax cut, and deteriorating economic conditions, it appears that a major tax cut this year is a certainty. If Democrats want to have some say in how the bill is shaped, they are going to have to give something. They should follow Brodhead's lead and press for an immediate reduction in the top rate from 39.6 percent to 33 percent, not phased-in over 5 years as in the House-passed bill. This would instantly change the terms of debate and put enormous pressure on Republicans to respond by supporting Democrat efforts to give more relief to those with low incomes.
Source: Bruce Bartlett, senior fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis, March 19, 2001.
The last time that happened, somebody drove an Olds into it and killed someone.
Good on you AC. This drunken, lying, womanizing, vomitus mass of sh*t murderer is a Senator!...I have to go puke now.
FMCDH
How many, besides the Beached Whale, are left?
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