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Bush's tax cuts for high earners "have been the biggest contributor to the budget deficit."
Nancy Pelosi on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 in during a news conference
Tax cuts for not biggest deficit factor
The Tax Policy Center calculated what share of the federal tax changes each income bracket gained from the Bush tax cuts. The top 5 percent of earners (those making about $225,000 or more) received 30.5 percent of the tax benefits in 2008, according to their analysis. But conversely, the bottom 95 percent of tax payers got 70 percent. Zoom out from the top 5 percent to the top 20 percent, and their share is 47.8 percent. Critics of the Bush tax cuts can call that disproportionate, but it's still less than half and therefore not "the biggest."
Although the wealthy did get benefits from the Bush tax cuts, their benefits did not outweigh those of everyone else put together.
"Within the tax cuts, the largest numbers went to the middle class, and those are the tax cuts that are most likely to be extended," she said. "I don't see how you could read the numbers to say otherwise."
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"We don't have a [52!] trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much." -- Ronald Reagan
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