Who benefits from the Bush tax cuts?

[unapatriciated]

I keep hearing over and over again that it is the middle class, poor and the jobless who will benefit most from these tax cuts. Not so, when you break it down to what an individual will get in $$$ the working poor sees a measly $53. I would much rather my $771 tax break be used to extend UI and that includes the 99'ers.

http://blog.reidreport.com/2010/08/who-benefits-from-the-bush-tax-cuts/

This can’t be said enough. The top 2 percent of income earners benefited overwhelmingly from the Bush tax cuts, which you should remind yourself every day, were WRITTEN BY REPUBLICANS, TO EXPIRE at the end of this year. Now that John Boehner has grabbed a full day’s headlines with a bait and switch call for President Obama to fire his economic team, which was really just a ruse to get oxygen for the resuscitated corpse that is the GOP tax cuts and corporate welfare economic plan, it might be a good time to review “the math,” as Karl Rove might say. The chart below was produced by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It shows who benefited most from the Bush tax cuts of 2003 and 2004, in terms of the average benefit families in various income groups would receive next year if the tax cuts were to be extended:

As you can see, the Bush tax cuts were a pretty sweet deal for the richest Americans, but not so much for average families. An explanation, from the Joint Committee on Taxation

[Starry Messenger]

1. k&r!

[midnight]

2. Excellent visual for those who want to see how much actually trickles

down to the poor...

[Rosa Luxemburg]

8. This is what I been saying and nobody is listening!

[TheKentuckian]

3. Hey, it is important we scuttle the government and the economy for lunch money.

Or something like that.

Most people live in under 75k land, why we are supposed to think a few bucks a week is the savior, I'll never guess.

We lost this as soon as we decided everyone is "middle class", even if they are easily in the top 20%.

[laconicsax]

10. +1

[laughingliberal]

4. K & R nt

[scarletwoman]

5. k&r

[RandomThoughts]

6. Was that graphic all over the news when a bill went up without the top bracket taxes?

Months ago, people use to make many posts about the freepers in post here, since what I presume to have been a shift of shards, or change of posting trends, many have not mentioned the freepers.

But I would guess that the right does not like that either, you just don't see their views in many places.

[unapatriciated]

12. not sure what you are talking about.

Are you saying this writer is a freeper or are you saying I'm a freeper?

Ms. Reid's columns have appeared in Salon and Common Dreams
http://blog.reidreport.com/about/

and I was born a D and have voted D for over 30 years.

edited for aging myself older than what I am;)

[Rosa Luxemburg]

7. not me!

a poor teacher.

[Tejas]

9. I would like to keep that $800-$900

By the way, how does the JCT arrive at these figures?

[unapatriciated]

11. here you go, the article I posted had a link to it.

Appendix
Measuring the Benefits of Particular Tax Cuts for the Illustrative Households
There are two general approaches to calculating the benefits of a particular tax cut or set of tax cuts, such as the 2001 tax cuts: calculate the effect of each tax cut (or set of tax cuts) individually — without regard to the impact of the other tax cuts — or calculate the effects of each tax cut sequentially, so that the effects of each tax cut are “stacked.”
The Tax Policy Center, in its estimates of the distributional impact of the various tax cut provisions, uses the sequential approach. Under this methodology, the tax benefits from each individual provision (or set of provisions) add to the total benefits from the Bush tax cuts as a whole, because the sequencing or “stacking” captures all interactions between the provisions.
One issue with this methodology is that the benefit from a given provision can vary significantly depending on its placement in the sequence — in other words, whether it is considered before, or after, other provisions. While alternative sequences would always produce the same totals, they might result in very different tax benefits attributed to each individual provision.
To calculate the tax cuts from individual provisions for the three illustrative households in this paper, we applied the other approach: measuring the impact of each provision individually. Specifically, we assumed that all of the middle-class tax cuts remain in place for 2011 and then calculated the increase in the household’s tax burden if a particular provision were removed. This approach is helpful for illustrating the benefits of a particular provision for households in a given point in the income distribution because the tax benefit does not depend on the provision’s place in the sequence.
The drawback of measuring the impact of each provision individually is that it does not capture the interactions between provisions. This means that the total benefit an illustrative household will receive from the entire package of tax cuts will not necessarily be reached by adding the benefits from each provision.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3263

Here is a little info about the columnist
http://blog.reidreport.com/about/

[Ozymanithrax]

13. Who will feel the pain most keenly?

Well the wealthy, if we deny them their breaks, go back to their Clintonian levels when they made massive amounts of money and enriched themselves. In short, they will feel no pain.

The poor and middle class, should these tax cuts not be extended, will feel the pain.

So do we give the rich the equivalent of a severe finger waggle from inside a first amendment fence and pay for that by taking money the poor and middle class need for food?

The question should be, is it the time to ask the poor and middle class to sacrifice for the economy when the rich don't notice.

And unless the expired tax cuts are used to fund programs that do not exist, all it means is we will borrow less. Getting rid of the tax cuts does not solve the problem with the deficit.

And, in the middle of a slump, this isn't the time to worry about the deficit anyway.

[leftstreet]

14. K&R