Taxing America's Patience

If you're still wondering how Jeb! Bush is hovering around the 5% mark in GOP polls, it's because he's trying to sell his brother's policies with all the charisma of Mitt Romney with a head cold. Greg Sargent:

Time magazine reports that a new analysis from the Dem-aligned Center for American Progress calculates that Jeb Bush’s new tax plan would cut his own taxes by $773,000. This suggests that Democrats will try do to Jeb what they did to Mitt Romney: Cast him as a walking symbol, and personal beneficiary, of GOP priorities that seek to preserve or even exacerbate a tax code rigged for the rich and against the middle class. 

What’s interesting here is the Bush campaign’s response to charges that his tax plan would result in a huge windfall for the rich: It is arguing that his plan would nonetheless increase the share of the overall tax burden that the wealthy bear.

Buttressing the argument that people like Jeb would make out very well from Jeb’s plan, the Wall Street Journal reports that a new analysis from a business-backed tax group concludes that the biggest boost in after-tax income under his plan goes to the top one percent of earners, that is, people making more than $406,000:

They would see their after-tax incomes increase on average by 11.6%, according to the analysis. That’s the biggest change for any income group. 

The average for all income levels would be a 3.3% increase in income. The second-biggest beneficiaries would be folks in the top 10%, those making more than about $117,000. Their incomes would go up by 4.7%. 

The Bush campaign responds that his tax plan also cuts taxes for tens of millions of middle class families, and eliminates income taxes entirely for a range of lower income families. In sum, a Bush campaign spokesman told the Journal, the Bush plan means that “the highest earners actually pay a greater share of the tax burden than they did before.”

Even stupid Republican voters are figuring out that a tax plan that would save the one percent billions in taxes means somebody's got to pay for schools and roads and water pipes and things, and that if the one percent isn't paying for it, somebody else has to.

More and more are finally realizing that "somebody else" = "me".  Only took them 40 years to figure that out, too.