http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20040112.html"In recent weeks, former Vermont governor Howard Dean's proposal to repeal the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 has come under fire from other contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination as well as conservative pundits. Regrettably, some of these critics - including two of Dean's Democratic rivals - have used slanted statistics and outright misstatements that echo tactics employed by President Bush during his campaigns to pass the cuts.
During last Tuesday's radio debate among the Democratic candidates, for example, Senator Joseph Lieberman, D-CT, claimed that Dean "would repeal the middle class tax cuts. That would cost middle-class families in New Hampshire,
average family, $2,000 a year that they worked so hard for. He would take it back." (Lieberman also told reporters that Dean's plan "would take back $2,000 from the average family in New Hampshire" during a conference call on December 18, 2003.) The Connecticut senator made a nearly identical claim in a January 4 debate, stating that, "here in Iowa, average family of four saved $1,800 a year under those tax cuts." Nor is Lieberman the only Democratic candidate to make such assertions. Senator John Edwards, D-NC, said on December 29 that Democrats "cannot say to the average family of four in Iowa: your taxes are going up by more than $1,700."
These statements appear to calculate the benefit to the "average" family either by dividing the total amount of the tax cut by the number of families receiving a cut, or by calculating the benefits of the cuts to specific hypothetical families. However, such methods often exaggerate the benefits of the tax cut for those with incomes in the middle of the income distribution - either because the arithmetic mean is skewed upward by the incomes of the wealthiest Americans, or because calculations are based on hypothetical families which benefit disproportionately. According to calculations <48K PDF> by the left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), for instance, the average reduction in taxes for Iowa residents with incomes in the middle 20% of the income distribution resulting from the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts is actually $908 for 2004, not $1,700-$1,800 as the Democrats quoted above claim. Likewise, CTJ notes that the average cut for New Hampshire residents with incomes in the middle 20 percent of the state's income distribution is $1,110 in 2004, not $2,000. <48K PDF>
These are tactics that the Bush administration has repeatedly used since it came into office. On several occasions last year, for instance, the President cited a hypothetical family of four making $40,000 that benefited disproportionately from the 2003 tax cut (its taxes would have fallen from $1,178 to $45) as proof that his plan "is good for the average citizen," including during a speech in Ohio on April 24, 2003. He also claimed in 2003, as he put it during his January 11, 2003 radio address, that "Ninety two million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money" under his 2003 tax cut (one of many such misleading "average" statistics he has cited)."
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