"Winners and Losers"? Perhaps "Lies and Liars"

With the presidential election season in full swing, the United Church if Christ spin machine is working overtime to shape the year's political debate. While the UCC isn't the only religious group to play politics, our denominational leaders do continue a tradition of positioning justice issues with distortions and half truths. The latest attempt is a document titled "Winners and Losers" which was written by Witness and Justice Ministries. The document attempts to identify who the winners and losers are in our country from a federal budget perspective. Our disagreement with the UCC document should not be considered an endorsement of the Bush administration budget - our disagreement is with the UCC's plainly dishonest use of the facts that are cited within the document - and whose conclusions are contradicted by the same source of information. We believe that the "witness" from our denomination must first be honest and truthful if it is to be credible.

From the first chapter, the document attempts to define who benefits from the Bush administration tax cuts and plainly states that "if all the tax cuts were in place, these households would receive fully 75% of all the tax-cut dollars, or an average amount of $7,153 (about $600 per month)." The tables used to support their claims come from the Brookings Institute Tax Policy Center. Table 1 from "Winners and Losers">

The document also breaks down who the largest recipients of the tax cuts are - clearly and accurately. The top 1% received a $66,208 tax cut which translates into 34.6% of "tax cut dollars". The next 19% receive 40.1% of the tax cut. Pretty outrageous, huh? What the document doesn't show is the rest of the table that the statistics were pulled from. <Table 2 from "Winners and Losers"

The apparent source of the "Winners and Losers" tables is "T03-0150" from Brookings Institute Tax Policy Center - but it only shows part of the Brookings Institute table. When the whole table is presented, an entirely different picture is presented.

For instance, although the top 1% receive 34.6% of the tax cut, they pay 34.1% of taxes. The $66,208 tax cut is actually coming off of $347,543 in taxes being paid. The percentage of federal taxes paid by the top 1% actually goes up slightly from 34% to 34.1%.

And what about the next 19%? Although they receive 40.1% of the tax cut, they pay 47.9% of taxes and after the tax cut, the percentage of taxes paid actually increases to 49.7%.

In all, the top 20% of tax payers pay 82% of taxes... and under the new tax plan, that share increases to 83.7%. "Winners and Losers" claims plainly that the top 20% have benefited from tax cuts... even though they will be paying a larger share of taxes. Remember, this information comes from the same source of information used in the UCC document.

This certainly changes the context of who the "Winners and Losers" are. In fact, there is a reasonable amount of parity between the between the tax cut and the amount of taxes paid.

^Table "T03-0150" from Brookings Institute Tax Policy Center

Clearly the writers of "Winners and Losers" looked at the Brookings Institute table when constructing their own table. The omission of the whole table demonstrates a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts - which is inexcusable when positioned as "witness".