Inequality by the Numbers

President Bush and his allies in Congress are getting ready to deliver another juicy gift to their rich friends—repeal of the estate tax, which applies only to estates worth more than $2 million (or $4 million for married couples). The House has passed the repeal, and the Senate could take it up next week.

This new handout would follow $70 billion in tax cuts President Bush recently signed into law—which will give people with annual incomes topping $1 million an average tax cut of $43,000. The middle 20 percent of taxpayers will average a $20 tax cut. What does that really mean?

• Twenty dollars will buy about six gallons of gas and a gallon of milk; $43,000 will buy 12,000 gallons of gas plus more than 2,600 gallons of milk.
• Twenty dollars will buy a little more than three days worth of family health insurance coverage; a millionaire’s tax cut will buy nearly 19 years of family coverage.

Do millionaires need these huge tax cuts more than ordinary working families? Here’s how things already stand.

• Corporate CEOs—with average compensation of $11.75 million in 2005—got raises averaging nearly $2 million in 2004.
• Median family income, however, fell by $ 1,669 in inflation-adjusted terms from 2000-2004.
• A minimum wage worker’s pay has fallen by 15.4 percent in real value since 1997, the last time the minimum wage was raised. An hour of minimum wage work will buy just one gallon of gas and a half-gallon of milk.
• No other industrialized country has more millionaires and billionaires than we do, but we rank 18th in keeping our children out of poverty.

Can America afford to pay for these millionaire tax cuts?

• The millionaire tax cuts and anti-working family economic priorities of President Bush and his congressional allies have helped push the national debt to more than $28,000 per person.
• Spending on the war in Iraq (just for Iraq—not for the whole “war on terror”) has cost $320 billion so far. That's $1,079 per person.

You don’t need to be a mathematician to see that something’s really wrong here, and it comes down to this: Working families can’t afford the Bush administration and its front men and women on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures. They’ve turned their backs on working families while working diligently to enrich the rich and liberate their corporate sponsors from the tyranny of responsibility to workers. They’re squeezing the life out of America’s middle class.

Tell your senators to oppose the estate tax repeal and to get busy working for working families instead. Just click here.

And between now and the 2006 elections, keep a close eye on your members of Congress (check the AFL-CIO Voting Record), your governor and state legislators to see whose side they are on—the side of working families or of millionaires, billionaires and irresponsible corporations. We’ve got to take our country back—and soon.