In case you were wondering where all that Bush tax relief was going:

If you are in the bottom 20%, making about $12K per year, your “tax relief” is 0.7% of your income (or ~$84/year).

But if you were in the top 1% of income earners, making on average about $1.5M, your relief is 3.9% of your income (or ~$564,000.00/year).

As I recall, in the first year, Bill Gates got about $30Million in “tax relief”.

In total across the country: if you are in the bottom 20%, your share of the total tax pie reduction is 1.1% (or $2.0 billion this year).

If you are in the top 1% of income earners, then your share of the total is %37.6 (or $72.6 Billion this year)

So, in one way, when Bush said last night that the average tax increase would be about $1,800 per wage earner if his tax cuts were not made permanent he was not lying.

On the other hand, if you are an average American making an average income, your tax increase if the tax cuts expire will be about $200/year.

Funny thing about that average – it is greatly skewed by the top 1% under the Bush tax plans. (And the Reagan and Bush Sr. tax plans before him).

I just got really curious last night during the state of the union speech when Bush made that $1,800/year per tax-payer comment last night regarding his tax cut. Because I knew I never saw anything close to $1,800 back in 2001 or any year since.

And funny thing: if you go to whitehouse.gov <link> and read the transcript of the state of the union address, the $1,800 quote does not appear. But if you go here: (also on whiehouse.gov) <link> it does appear. Strangely when you go to link for the SotU address on whitehouse.gov, or Google it, you get an edited version of the SotU address. You have to follow a link for the “Full Transcript” to get the full, unedited version. Most news services have posted, or are linking to, the edited version. So when I first Googled this to make sure I had my facts straight (was it $1,800 per wage-earner, or was it $1,800 per tax-payer?) my first impression was that I had hallucinated this part of the speech because it was nowhere to be found. Nice accountability. Good truthiness.

Tax figures from http://www.ctj.org/

Read it for yourself here: <link>