Bush comfortable with the rich avoiding taxes

Following up on an earlier item, the president’s appearance on “Fox News Sunday” covered a fair amount of ground, but this exchange helped highlight so many of Bush’s flaws.

WALLACE: [In November, the Republican nominee] would be weighed down by a faltering economy, an unpopular war, at least according to the polls, and — forgive me — according to polls, an unpopular president. How does he overcome all of that and beat the Democrats? BUSH: Because there are two big issues. One is who’s going to keep your taxes low. Most Americans feel overtaxed. And I promise you the Democrat [sic] Party is going to field a candidate that says, “I’m going to raise your taxes.” They’re going to say, “Oh, we’re only going to tax the rich people.” But most people in America understand that, you know, rich people hire good accountants and figure out how not to, you know, necessarily pay all the taxes, and the middle class gets stuck.

I can’t help but wonder if the president appreciates how foolish this is.

On the one hand, Bush is conceding that he’s content to allow the very wealthy to “hire good accountants,” shirk their legal responsibilities, and pass along the tax burden to the middle class. If the president is convinced that the rich are able to “figure out” how not to pay their tax bill, shouldn’t he, you know, care about fixing a system in which, by his own explanation, middle-class families are getting screwed?

On the other hand, if the very wealthy are, in fact, successfully avoiding taxes, why is it the Bush administration has gone to great lengths to cut their taxes even more? In other words, as far as the president is concerned, to spur economic growth, we should cut taxes for the rich, allow them to spend more, and wait for prosperity to trickle down to everyone else. Except, to hear Bush explain it on Fox News, these people have already figured out how to beat the system.

Why, then, give tax cuts to rich people who aren’t paying their taxes to begin with? Indeed, why make that the centerpiece of the administration’s entire economic policy for more than seven years?



Keep in mind, this wasn’t just some dumb, random remark that the president uttered without forethought. On the contrary, he’s been making this exact same argument for years.

* October 2004: “[John Kerry] says, ‘Oh, I’m just going to tax the rich.’ Well, the rich hire lawyers and accountants for a reason — that’s to stick you with the tab.”

* August 2004: “[Y]ou know how the tax code works. When they say, ‘tax the rich,’ those are the folks who have got the accountants to see to it they don’t pay tax, so guess who gets stuck with the bill? You’re going to get stuck with the bill. The worst thing for job creation is to be running up the taxes on the working people of this country. And we’re not going to let [John Kerry] have a chance to do so.”

As for the Fox News interview, Chris Wallace, not surprisingly, didn’t follow up on the president’s remarks, but I have a question for Bush, and maybe some enterprising reporter could bring it up at the next White House press briefing: if the president is convinced that the rich are violating tax law, and that the middle class is getting stuck with the bill, why hasn’t he proposed doing anything about it?