Tax-cuts package needs revision: Only benefits the rich

Published: October 25, 2005

As the Republican Senate leader during the first two years of President George W. Bush's administration, U.S. Sen. Trent Lott led the fight for passage of the president's tax-cuts package.

Last Monday, the non-partisan Urban Institute's Tax Policy Center published a 10-page report on the Child Tax Credit. It is full of numbers and percentages and graphs which usually don't compute in my brain. However, this time, the huge discrepancy between what the rich get and the poor don't get was obvious.

I didn't have to sort through a lot of statistics to see that the rich are getting richer at the expense of the poor. I also looked at their graphs showing the distribution of the 2006 tax cuts.

Numbers speak for themselves:

53.5 percent of the tax cuts will go to 0.2 percent of households that have annual incomes of more than $1 million; 43.1 percent of the tax cuts will go the 3.5 percent of households that earn between $200,000 and $1 million. That leaves only 3.3 percent of the tax-cut benefits for the 96 percent of U.S. households with incomes below $200,000 and none of the benefits will be available to families with income under $75,000.

Some 98 percent of households earning between $50,000 and $100,000 receive the full child tax credit; 9 percent of households earning $10,000 to $20,000 get the full child tax credit. Households earning below $10,000 do not qualify for any credit.

This means that 10 million children with very low family incomes received no credit. Another 10 million children qualified for only partial credit.

I hope others will use this information to ask their representatives to re-consider the tax-cuts policy.

Judith Rothstein

Port Townsend, Wash.