"Yeah, that's true, a 60% drop in welfare cases, despite a much larger population." -- Jayson

The fact that people have been booted off the welfare rolls should, of course, not be seen as indicating a reduction of poverty. Nope, not at all. Since Bush took over, the number of people living in poverty in the United States went up by five million:

http://www.dems.gov/index.asp?Type=B_PR&SEC=%7BD68CD0B2-1442-4804-9F6B-AF67DE7FF585%7D&DE=%7BFDD09C4F-E958-4E13-A92B-179C2FAC6FEA%7D&Design=PrintView

When Bushie inherited that budget surplus from Clinton, and it was clear that (in Spring, 2001) a recession was underway, Chimpy could have structured his tax cuts so that the surplus and additional tax relief were given to primarily the middle class, as ten Nobel Laureates in Economics encouraged him to do. After all, who is most vulnerable to slipping into poverty as a result of a recession, the middle class or the extremely wealthy? But instead the Moron King chose to give the surplus and tax relief mostly to extremely wealthy people like himself. Favoring the extremely wealthy is the Jesus Thing to Do, right, conservatives???

So no surprise that after having gone down during the Clinton years, the poverty rate went back up during Bushie's Reign of Error. It's all attributable to those who call themselves Christians, but in no way are followers of Christ.

You know Herman, if you acted like an adult people might listen to what you have to say. Name calling is childish.

Herman misrepresents the amount of the Bush tax cuts that went to the middle class, but that is typical of Herman's irrationality and dishonesty.

Lying is the liberal thing to do, right Herman?

Just as an example of the kind of dishonesty Herman traffics in, go to this page:
http://www.irs.ustreas.gov/taxstats/indtaxstats/article/0,,id=129270,00.html

Once there, download Table 6. Looking at the table ( and inverting the numbers ) you learn that the percentage of income tax paid by the wealthiest in the US has been going up each year. Lines 113 to 133 reflect the percentage of income tax paid - the line for 2005, the most recent for which these stats are vailable tells us that in 2005, the wealthiest 1% of income tax filers paid more than 39% of the total income tax paid ( line 133 column 6), and that fraction has been going up steadily.

Looking back in time, you see that the wealthy pay more of the tax burden during the Bush years than during the Clinton years.

But then, the last thing Herman understands is facts.

SPQR thinks he has caught something big, when it is nothing at all. If a guy earning $1,000,000 a year has his taxes cut from, say, $300,000 to $250,000, while a guy earning $10,000 per year has his taxes go from $3,000 to $2,400, between the two of them the ratio of taxes paid by the wealthy individual have gone up, from ten to one to 14 to 1, but that doesn't change the fact that most of the tax cut between the two ($50,600) went to the wealthy guy!

The Bushies deliberately designed their tax cuts so that those that only think at the superficial level (e.g., SPQR) can later point to proportional changes ostensibly in favor of the poor as if that's a big deal. Doesn't change the fact that the first of Bush's tax cuts took place when the country was in a recession, gave an extremely high proportion of the tax break to the extremely wealthy, despite the fact that it was the middle class most at risk of slipping into poverty. Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics foresaw problems with the particular way Bush chose to cut taxes, and it turns out they were right. Or do you need to once again revisit:

http://www.dems.gov/index.asp?Type=B_PR&SEC=%7BD68CD0B2-1442-4804-9F6B-AF67DE7FF585%7D&DE=%7BFDD09C4F-E958-4E13-A92B-179C2FAC6FEA%7D&Design=PrintView

to compare the Clinton years with the Bush years?

"between the two of them the ratio of taxes paid by the wealthy individual has gone up, from ten to one to 14 to 1" -- error, it should read
"from 100 to 1 to 104 to one." in my last post.

So - the actual quantity of taxes paid doesn't matter, what matters is the ratio.

And because it isn't high enough, there's something inherently unfair about it all.

So. How much did the bottom 50% pay?

According to this... 4%. Of course that was in 2001. In 1995, it was 5.6%.

Top 25% paid 82%.

Top 10% paid 64.9%

Top 5%? 53%.

Top 1%? 33.9%.

You know, I'm not seeing what the problem is here. Those who make more pay a lot more in taxes. Those who don't make much, don't pay much.

The government doesn't give a damn if the money comes from the bottom 50% or the top 1% - all they care about is the money.

"From each, according to his abilities. To each, according to his needs." Seems like the IRS has the "FROM" part down pretty well.

Herman, what I did was show that your claims were not correct, you then attempted to hide the fact that your class warfare rhetoric was garbage by inventing fake numbers.

The real numbers show that the percentage of income tax revenue paid by the wealthy has been increasing steadily and have averaged more in the Bush administration than the Clinton administration.

Those are real numbers, Herman - not your made up nonsense. You make up nonsense numbers because you don't know what you are talking about. I deal in real numbers.

JLawson, in 2001 it was 33.9% for the top 1%, four years later it was more than 39% which illustrates my point - Herman is full of manure.

The reality remains that there was not an "extremely high proportion" of the tax cuts given to the wealthy. The tax cuts were more evenly spread than Herman wants to admit, his only response are fake numbers not real ones. The distribution of the tax burden, as shown by the figures that I link to show that the distribution of the tax burden does not favor the wealth as Herman fraudulently claims.