The Bush Tax Cuts, wrongly called “tax cuts for the rich” even by McCain, mathematically made the tax code more progressive. By taking a goodly number of low earners off the rolls altogether the Bush Cuts helped build the “47 percent.”
The progressive ratcheting is all but impossible to reverse. But if we went back to the Clinton tax tables it would do that. Oh the horror.
Yet another reason to despise the Bush branch of the GOPE as just another branch of Fabian Socialists.
The GOPE does (at the time) what the left could only dream of doing and then lets the left twist the publics understanding of it into something the left can campaign against. They get to have their cake and eat it too.
We might be beyond that time when the left needs to have the faux-right do their dirty work.