Peter Ferrara has this exactly right--Obama and the Democrats have distorted the Reagan Republican record on taxes this entire year, and we've got to begin counterattacking:
"In his standard stump speech, Obama would say, "We've given more and more to those with the most and hoped that prosperity would trickle down to everyone else. And guess what? It didn't. So it's time to try something new. It's time to grow this economy from the bottom up. It's time to invest in the middle-class again." In other words, Republicans cut taxes only for the rich, and forgot about the middle class and lower income workers....This is a completely false smear of Reagan Republican tax policy. If we let them stick us with this false tag, they will use it politically against us for a generation. The official U.S. government data from the IRS and the Congressional Budget Office now show that the top 1% of income earners, the true rich, pay 40% of all federal income taxes, almost twice their share of national income. The top 20% of income earners pay 86.7% of federal income taxes. The federal income tax burden today is basically borne by these top 20% of income earners. By contrast, the bottom 40% of income earners as a group pay negative 3.8% of all income taxes. That means instead of paying taxes into the system, on net they draw payments out of the income tax system equal to 3.8% of all federal income tax revenues. The middle 20% of income earners, the true middle class, pay just 4.7% of all federal income taxes. This is the result of Reagan Republican supply-side economics that began with Reagan and Jack Kemp in the 1970s and 1980s, through Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America, to the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Reagan and his Republicans have abolished federal income taxes on the working class. Moreover, they have almost abolished federal income taxes on the actual middle class (the middle 20%)."
That last sentence is the key.
And think about it--when, exactly, over this entire past year, did we hear John McCain challenge Obama and the Democrats when they claimed Republican tax cuts had only helped the rich?
I can't think of a time. And that's sad. Time to put a stop to it! Let's get to work, conservatives (as Barry Goldwater would have said)...
