Noodling:

From the White House Fact Sheet about taxes and their proposals we read:

Example:
A family of four with an income of $40,000 would see their federal income taxes fall from $1,178 to $45 under the President's plan.

Is this ($45 income tax) something to be proud of?

Let's do a little back-of-the-envelope figuring.

$45 is 0.1% of $40,000 - down from the 3% the family currently pays. A reduction of 96%. If that's applied to all taxpayers (and remember, people at the Cato Institute think they should be abolished entirely), the total revenues from income taxes falls from $869 billion dollars to $33 billion - reducing the total revenues from $1.891 trillion to $989 billion - but there is $1.332 trillion of mandatory spending + interest on the debt, which means that even if all discretionary spending was eliminated, there would be an annual deficit of $343 billion.

What's discretionary spending, you ask? Well, just about everything other than Social Security and Medicare. It's:

National defense
International affairs
General science space and technology
Energy
Natural resources and environment
Agriculture
Commerce and housing credit
Transportation Community and regional development
Education training reemployment and social services
Health Medicare (Administrative costs)
Income security Social Security (Administrative costs)
Veterans benefits and services
Administration of Justice
General government

NOTE: While processing the data from the CBO, our spell-check highlighted the following:

Natural resources and envirnoment
Eduction, traning, remployment, and social services

Looks like something George Bush might have typed!

posted by Quiddity at 4/17/2003 08:09:00 AM