>If people want reliable numbers on these issues, I
>would refer them to ... Citizens For Tax Justice web site (www.ctj.org),
"From 1977 to 1990, Congress enacted seven major tax bills and many other minor ones, raising or lowering tax liabilities for individuals and corporations. the results of this legislative torrent are startlingly one-sided. *Citizens for Tax Justice*, a labor-supported advocacy group, calculated the cumulative effects:
"If Congress had done nothing since 1977 to alter the U.S. tax code, passed no new legislation at all, nine out of ten American families would be paying less. That is, a smaller share of their incomes would be devoted to federal taxes.
Yet, paradoxically, the government would be collecting more revenue each year--almost $70 billion more--if none of those tax bills had been enacted.
"How to explain this? Where did all that money go? ...[I]t went to corporations and to the one in ten families at the top of the income ladder. Their taxes were cut by spectacular dimensions.
The tax burden on the richest 1 percent of the population fell cumulatively be a staggering 36 percent, compared to what they would have owed under the 1977 tax code. As politicians from both parties congratulated themselves on delivering one tax cut after another, families in the very middle of the income ladder experienced a 7 percent increase in their federal tax burden."
--William Gredier, Who Will Tell the People, citing "The Decline in Progressivity and the Decline in Revenue," Citizens for Tax Justice, 2/23/90.
Guess it depends on how one defines "stable burden," eh?
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