No wonder the public doubts that Bob Dole’s tax cut and budget-balancing numbers add up! Donald Rumsfeld, national chairman of the Dole/Kemp campaign, in defending the Dole plan against Tribune editorial criticism, adds a new monstrous blooper, getting income taxes and total taxes mixed up.
Rumsfeld asserts that “. . . under Ronald Reagan’s tax policies, revenues from the federal income tax increased from $599.3 billion in 1981 to $990.7 billion in 1989. But those figures are for total taxes, not income taxes. Total taxes indeed thus went up 65 percent over eight years–due to inflation, which came to 36 percent, as well as normal growth in the economy. But individual income-tax receipts rose only 56 percent, from $285.9 billion to $445.7 billion. Meanwhile, Social Security taxes contributed mightily to the increase in total taxes, rising from $182.7 billion to $359.4 billion, a whopping 97 percent.
Is the Rumsfeld mistake accidental? Or is there some hidden agenda to make up for the huge loss of tax revenue from Dole’s proposed income-tax cuts by raising Social Security taxes again–or perhaps cutting Social Security benefits?
