Thursday, 8 March 2001

The lead story on CNN.com had the following lead-in:

As the House of Representatives debated, President Bush said today he was “confident they’ll do the right thing” on a Republican tax bill that will reconfigure the tax rate structure.

Somehow, I think the President and I have a very different vision of the outcome of the House doing “the right thing.”  (How like a conservative to assume that there is only one “right thing.”)  If you’re at all interested, one of my co-workers did an analysis of the effective raise people would receive as a result of the competing tax plans.  Note that the x-axis is logarithmic, so each major tick is a tenfold increase in yearly income.  It turns out that (if you believe these numbers) the very poor get a 5% raise, as do people with an annual income of $600,000.  While I can’t absolutely guarantee the accuracy of this chart, I dug through the numbers and they seem right—plus, the lines are more or less what you’d expect from each party’s position.  Of course, the beauty of this kind of chart is that each side of the debate sees it as ringing support for their position.

Gonna be a long four years.

• Thursday, 8 March 2001 was published on Thursday, March 8th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
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