Surprise! Obama Tops Bush as a Tax-Cutter
Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry this week attacked President Obama's "tax and spend" agenda.
Nice try. In fact, Obama is a much bigger tax-cutter than his immediate predecessor in the White House. Reports Washington think-tank the Center for American Progress:
By the end of his first term, President Obama will have signed into law a series of tax cuts that, taken together, exceed the value of those signed into law by President Bush.... [I]n one fell swoop, President Obama cut taxes by $654 billion in 2011 and 2012 alone.By comparison, Bush lowered taxes in 2001 and 2003 by the equivalent of $574 billion in today's dollars, or 1.1 percent of GDP. If you factor in the tax cuts that Obama granted in 2009 as part of his stimulus package and his December 2010 extension of the Bush cuts, that total climbs to $900 billion, or north of 1.5 percent of GDP. Obama is also proposing another $250 billion in cuts as part of his jobs plan. If Congress passes those, he will have reduced taxes by $1.1 trillion, nearly twice as much as Bush did in his first term.
Don't you hate it when facts get in the way of a good story? There is one minor difference between the two POTUSes -- where the money went. Most of the Bush cuts went to the richest 20 percent of Americans. Only the scale of that transfer was new, by the way. Between 1960 and 2004, the top 0.1 percent of U.S. taxpayers -- who earned an average of $7.1 million per year -- saw the share of their income paid in total federal taxes drop from 60 to 33.6 percent. So this goes back a ways, in other words.
Obama's cuts are distributed more evenly. For instance, CAP notes that most of the tax breaks provided under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act two years ago went to the bottom 80 percent of U.S. households.
As one tax wonk tells The Daily Beast's Eleanor Clift:
"It doesn't come from the same place as Bush or Reagan, whose economic philosophy is no tax is a good tax, and that particularly targeted tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations brought good things," says Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.Of course, there's room for debate over whether Obama's overall tax policies have helped or hurt the economy. But to paint him as a typical tax-and-spend liberal is to fictionalize his record and, if Perry cares, to mislead the public. Let it go, governor.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
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