By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Under President Bush’s tax giveaway plan, the rich would receive tax cuts worth more than the annual salary of a typical DC 37 member.

“The Bush tax cut plan is a cynical scheme that unfairly benefits the rich while providing insignificant relief to working families,” DC 37 Administrator Lee Saunders said.

All told, the 10-year, $1.6 trillion plan would give 43 percent of the benefits to the wealthiest 1 percent of the population, according to Citizens for Tax Justice,which advocates a fairer tax system.

George and Laura Bush would be among the elite group that benefits disproportionately from the tax. They’d see their tax bill reduced by nearly $100,000 under the plan, Citizens for Tax Justice says.

The average $46,000 tax gift for the top 1 percent of taxpayers is about $17,000 more than an average DC 37 member makes in a year. A paltry 16 percent of the tax cut would go to ordinary working families.

Bush is proposing the giveaway at a time when the wealthy are already paying a shrinking share of their income in taxes.

From 1988 to 1998, the income of the top 1 percent increased eight times as fast as the bottom 90 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a non-profit research organization in Washington. But in 1998, the wealthy paid less of their income in taxes than at any time since 1992.

Part of the Republicans’ sneaky strategy to pass the plan is to give it a false working-class gloss.

Wolf in workers’ clothing
On March 8, the National Association of Manufacturers asked business leaders and lobbyists to join in a tax cut rally at the Capitol, but told them to dress like Joe Six Pack rather than Mr. Moneybags.

Citing instructions from the office of Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (Rep.-Ill.), the NAM memo said, “They do not need people in suits. WE NEED BODIES — they must be DRESSED DOWN, appear to be REAL WORKER types.”

Perhaps the most outrageous of Bush’s cuts would scrap the estate tax, which affects only the wealthiest 2 percent of taxpayers. Astonishingly, the 4,500 largest estates would receive as much — $28 billion — as the next 142 million taxpayers, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says.

The group says the president’s $1.6 trillion tax scheme would really cost the country over $2 trillion by pushing up interest payments on the federal debt. A $2 trillion tax cut would leave almost nothing to help the 43 million Americans who have no health insurance and the 20 percent of the nation’s children who live in poverty. The Bush plan would give away the funds that could provide a prescription drug benefit for the elderly and protecting the financial health of Medicare and Social Security.

  “The tax cut’s ultimate purpose is to undercut the social safety net and the role of government,” said Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. “This adds to the sharp edge of the modern economy, which hurts workers with globablization, privatization and deregulation.”