I’m not sure this post is going to qualify as applying political science research to anything, but I just want to point out again that the current “Democratic proposal for extending tax cuts”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/us/politics/03million.html?_r=1&ref=politics is a tax cut for _everyone_ who pays taxes. The cut off rate is for _income_ over $250,000 (or “$1,000,000”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/us/politics/03million.html?_r=1&ref=politics, or whatever). But _people_ who earn over $250,000 will still get a tax cut on their first $250,000 of income. Yet here is how “Politico”:http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/45890.html reports on the bill:
bq. The objection means any tax-cut votes will be delayed until Saturday while Reid begins taking the procedural steps necessary to open debate on two separate measures: first, to limit the tax cuts to _people_ who earn less than $250,000, and second, to _people_ who earn less than $1 million. (emphasis added)
I don’t mean to pick on Politico. I heard the exact same thing on two different NPR programs this morning, the news of the hour and yesterday’s “Marketplace”:http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media_player/popup.php?name=marketplace/pm/2010/12/02/marketplace_cast3_20101202_64. (To their credit, the hosts at NPR’s “It’s All Politics podcast”:http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=5495231, Ron Elving and Ken Rudin, got it right.) But I think we should really be calling journalists on this, which is what I’m trying to do here.
Now to be fair, if you want to talk about the policy proposal in terms of what will happens to the _amount_ of taxes people are paying right now, it is correct that people earning over $250,000 will pay more taxes come January 1 if the Democratic plan passes, but _only on income beyond $250,000_. So if you make $250,001 a year, your tax rate will only increase on that last $1. But again, if you want to talk about extending the Bush tax cuts, the Democratic proposal ensures that those tax cuts will be extended to _everyone_ for their first $250,000 of earned income.