9 President George W. Bush and his Cabinet spent the week unpacking the trunk of proposals they lugged to the White House. Under the Bush scheme, the existing five tax brackets would be cut to four, and today's rates of 15 to 39.6 percent would drop to 10 percent to 33 percent. The president wants to expand child care credits, repeal the estate tax, and ease the marriage penalty. Bush says he wants the tax cuts made retroactive to January 1, which he believes would help stave off the looming recession. In fact, we need tax relief yesterday.
Critics say the tax cut's promise of relief for all is a mirage.
An analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington public interest group, states the bottom 40 percent of tax filers would receive just four percent of the cuts. The bottom 80 percent of taxpayers would receive only 29 percent of the tax cuts. Nearly one in every three U.S. families would not receive any assistance from the tax provisions that President Bush is likely to send to Congress on February 8. The top five percent of filers would garner a little more than half of the tax cuts. Others point out abolition of the estate tax, which Clinton vetoed last year, would reward only the very rich.