12.14.07
Shocking News!! Republicans Favor The Uber-Rich
We all know the saying/generalization about the two party’s in our country. The Democrats are for the people - although they’ve been doing a poor job of showing that at the national level. And the Republicans favor the Rich. They’ve definitely been holding up their end. From this post by Paul Krugman, Bush boom bah, about a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) release, Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates: 1979 to 2005 [.PDF], it’s easy to see why. Here’s the meat from Krugman’s post:
Here’s what the numbers say about percentage gains in after-tax income from 2003 to 2005:
Bottom quintile: 2%
Next quintile: 2.4%
Middle quintile: 3.9%
Fourth quintile: 3.7%
Top quintile: 16%Top 10%: 20.9%
Top 5%: 27.7%
Top 1%: 43.5%It was a boom, all right — but only for a few people.
One other thing that’s striking from the report, by the way, is that over the 26 years the estimates span, the only significant gains for the bottom two quintiles, and most of the gains for the middle quintile, took place during the Clinton years. Exactly why is an interesting question, but the empirical fact is that over the past generation the only good years for lower and middle income families were when a Democrat was in the White House. This is an example of a broader, and honestly mysterious, correlation identified by Larry Bartels in his paper “Partisan politics and the U.S. income distribution.”
Trickle on, not trickle down.