Dubya Did It First

Ode to "middle class tax cuts," real and fraudulent (via Newsmax Insider):

Barack Obama's campaign pledge to "rebuild the middle class" by giving tax breaks to 95% of workers and their families surely won him votes.

But an analysis by Investor’s Business Daily found that the middle class already got a large tax break under President George W. Bush.

Citing data from the Congressional Budget Office, IBD disclosed that the
effective tax rate on the middle fifth of households fell from an average of about 17.1% under President Bill Clinton to 14.4% under Bush. That's a 16% tax cut for the middle class.

As for the oft-heard claim from the left that middle-class incomes are stagnant or shrinking, a study last year by the Minneapolis Fed concluded that "incomes of most types of middle American households have increased substantially over the past three decades."

Real household income did grow just 18% over the past thirty years. But after correcting for distortions in the data, Terry Fitzgerald, a Fed senior economist, found that "median household income for most household types . . . increased by 44% to 62% from 1976 to 2006." And per-person income surged 80%.

IBD observes, “Yes, many Americans are suffering in this recession, including the middle class. But the last thing we need is another general in a phony class war telling people how bad they have it.”

Too late, gentlebeings, too late.

Maybe it wouldn't have been if anybody in Team Sith had thought things through sufficiently to realize that running away from Bush43 was a bad idea in that doing so abandoned Bush's strengths and accomplishments - like his two tax cuts and the six-year economic boom they unleashed - while trying to escape his shortcomings - real and manufactured - was futile in the kind of hopelessly slanted media environment that dominated 2008.

But then, if Dubya and/or anybody in his Administration had ever bothered to toot his/their own horn once in awhile about said economic accomplishments (as Bill Clinton surely would have in the same place, and in fact did on the backs of the GOP Congress' successes), maybe the American people would have remembered them instead of just getting their heads crammed to bursting with Bushophobia for eight years and eight years of Obamafilia in the space of a year and a half.  Sure would have helped when the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb went off in September, and at least might have reinforced the truism that only when EVERYBODY's taxes are cut can the "middle class" truly benefit from it.

Instead, Red Barry's "middle class tax cut" is destined to go the same limbo Bill Clinton's did, as EVERYBODY's taxes are going to go through the roof under his incoming Marxist junta.

The irony is, just like the parental intelligence bell curve, public appreciation for George W. Bush's economic genius is, before too long, destined to spike back up to where it once was, as We, The People re-learn the hard way the tax policy lessons we have no excuse for forgetting.