[Mb-civic] Weapons of Math DestructionBy PAUL KRUGMAN

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 14, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Weapons of Math Destruction
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Now it can be told: President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney based
their re-election campaign on lies, damned lies and statistics.

The lies included Mr. Cheney's assertion, more than three months after
intelligence analysts determined that the famous Iraqi trailers weren't
bioweapons labs, that we were in possession of two "mobile biological
facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox."

The damned lies included Mr. Bush's declaration, in his "Mission
Accomplished" speech, that "we have removed an ally of Al Qaeda."

The statistics included Mr. Bush's claim, during his debates with John
Kerry, that "most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans."

Compared with the deceptions that led us to war, deceptions about taxes can
seem like a minor issue. But it's all of a piece. In fact, my early sense
that we were being misled into war came mainly from the resemblance between
the administration's sales pitch for the Iraq war ‹ with its evasions,
innuendo and constantly changing rationale ‹ and the selling of the Bush tax
cuts.

Moreover, the hysterical attacks the administration and its defenders launch
against anyone who tries to do the math on tax cuts suggest that this is a
very sensitive topic. For example, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa once
compared people who say that 40 percent of the Bush tax cuts will go to the
richest 1 percent of the population to, yes, Adolf Hitler.

And just as administration officials continued to insist that the trailers
were weapons labs long after their own intelligence analysts had concluded
otherwise, officials continue to claim that most of the tax cuts went to the
middle class even though their own tax analysts know better.

How do I know what the administration's tax analysts know? The facts are
there, if you know how to look for them, hidden in one of the
administration's propaganda releases.

The Treasury Department has put out an exercise in spin called the "Tax
Relief Kit," which tries to create the impression that most of the tax cuts
went to low- and middle-income families. Conspicuously missing from the
document are any actual numbers about how the tax cuts were distributed
among different income classes. Yet Treasury analysts have calculated those
numbers, and there's enough information in the "kit" to figure out what they
discovered.

An explanation of how to extract the administration's estimates of the
distribution of tax cuts from the "Tax Relief Kit" is here. Here's the
bottom line: about 32 percent of the tax cuts went to the richest 1 percent
of Americans, people whose income this year will be at least $341,773. About
53 percent of the tax cuts went to the top 10 percent of the population.
Remember, these are the administration's own numbers ‹ numbers that it
refuses to release to the public.

I'm sure that this column will provoke a furious counterattack from the
administration, an all-out attempt to discredit my math. Yet if I'm wrong,
there's an easy way to prove it: just release the raw data used to construct
the table titled "Projected Share of Individual Income Taxes and Income in
2006." Memo to reporters: if the administration doesn't release those
numbers, that's in effect a confession of guilt, an implicit admission that
the data contradict the administration's spin.

And what about the people Senator Grassley compared to Hitler, those who say
that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans will receive 40 percent of the
tax cuts? Although the "Tax Relief Kit" asserts that "nearly all of the tax
cut provisions" are already in effect, that's not true: one crucial piece of
the Bush tax cuts, elimination of the estate tax, hasn't taken effect yet.
Since only estates bigger than $2 million, or $4 million for a married
couple, face taxation, the great bulk of the gains from estate tax repeal
will go to the wealthiest 1 percent. This will raise their share of the
overall tax cuts to, you guessed it, about 40 percent.

Again, the point isn't merely that the Bush administration has squandered
the budget surplus it inherited on tax cuts for the wealthy. It's the fact
that the administration has spent its entire term in office lying about the
nature of those tax cuts. And all the world now knows what I suspected from
the start: an administration that lies about taxes will also lie about
other, graver matters.