Cool.

Now, all his opponents have to do during the election is to show this and it's "buh bye, Bush".

The Treasury Department is working up more sophisticated distribution tables that are expected to make the poor appear to be paying less in taxes and the rich to be paying more.

"appear"?

Answering critics who say the working poor do face high taxes because they pay high Social Security payroll taxes, outgoing White House economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey told the AEI tax forum that the 12.4 percent Social Security levy should not be considered when tax burdens are calculated. Lindsey said the Social Security tax is ultimately returned to the taxpayer as a benefit.

So, it isn't a tax if you MIGHT collect it later. Or if someone you know might collect it. Or if someone you don't know might collect it.

Lindsey compared the Social Security tax to a deposit in a neighborhood bank's Christmas Club. In such clubs, periodic deposits are returned in a lump sum during the holiday season, and Lindsey said no one would consider such deposits a tax.

*boggle*

But if I were to die, then the money in that account would go to whomever I want to receive it.

Yet, if I die, the money in my SocSec "Christmas Club" won't. Unless they meet governmental guidelines.

Ummm, no. I'm not seeing how they're the same.

Early this month, J.T. Young, the deputy assistant treasury secretary for legislative affairs, lamented in a Washington Times opinion article: "[Higher] earners cannot produce the level of revenues needed to sustain the liberals' increasingly costly spending programs over the long-term. . . . If federal government spending is not controlled, then the tax burden will have to begin extending backward down the income ladder."

Ummm, isn't it Bush who's running up the debt right now? He's a "liberal"?

But for the purposes of a tax reform debate, removing Social Security taxes from consideration could have a sizable impact. The top 5 percent of the nation's taxpayers paid 41 percent of all federal taxes, a hefty share, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. But that same group paid from 56 to 59 percent of all income taxes, an even more impressive burden.

Impressive. But how much of the wealth does that 5% hold? It they hold more than 59% of the wealth, they're being under taxed.

But to some conservatives, the shift is long overdue. Rep. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) has argued for two years that the nation is entering a dangerous period in which the burden of financing government is falling on too few people.

Fucking right! We have far too much of our wealth concentrated in too few individuals. We need to counter this concentration.

In such an environment, the masses will always vote for politicians promising ever-more-generous social programs, knowing they will not have to pay for such programs, DeMint warned.

Ummm, wasn't there a lot of public opposition to Bush's tax "rebate"?