Korea? Eisenhower? No. Before Vietnam, the Democrats used to talk about the economy. Heck, Republicans talked about the economy, news media occasionally referenced it.
Donald Luskin and a reader of his dig into the data of falling income in an NRO piece called "Donald Luskin on John Kerry, the Middle-Class Squeeze, the New York Times, and David Cay Johnston" (Follow the link to see the charts.)
It's plain as day: The richer you were, the worse you got hit. So why wasn't the headline "The Rich Get Poorer, and The Poor Get Richer?" Because the Times and the rest of the liberal establishment will never admit that such a thing occurred during George W. Bush's presidency.Another table accompanying the story shows that the middle class is not only doing fine, but expanding -- in direct contradiction to Kerry's convention claim that it's shrinking. This second table (pictured below) shows the change in the number of tax returns filed in each income category. Note that the lowest-income category shrank as people on the bottom rung of the economic ladder advanced. All of the highest-income categories shrank, too, as "the rich" fell down a rung or two (from the artificial heights of the Clinton bubble, back when liberals weren't so concerned with income inequality because their team was in the White House).
UPDATE: Susan Lee takes on a similar topic on in the WSJ Political Diary (four bucks a month -- you gotta subscribe!):
As lowdown leaks and sneaky spin go, the Kerry campaign can claim a big win. Last Friday, before the Congressional Budget Office released its study on the impact of the Bush tax cuts, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal not only trumpeted the CBO results, but sounded just like a Kerry campaign press release.Posted by jk at August 19, 2004 11:05 AMIt was read-all-about it, get-your-middleclass-squeeze here. The Washington Post carried a 1000-word story headlined "Tax Burden Shifts to the Middle" and The New York Times' headline instructed "Report Finds Tax Cuts Heavily Favor the Wealthy."
Well, not exactly. The CBO found that the Bush tax cuts pushed down effective income tax rates for everybody (everybody!) and that the second lowest quintile joined those in the lowest quintile in paying no taxes at all. Moreover, when the dust from the cuts settled, the share paid by the richest increased while the share paid by the lowest three quintiles decreased.
The confusion (if it can be called by such a polite term) came from a second category of CBO analysis, known as total effective federal tax rates. That category took all taxes together, income as well as payroll, excise and other taxes paid by employers, and attributed them to individual taxpayers. In effect, then, as income taxes shrunk, these other, more regressive taxes had a greater impact, causing the middle quintiles some damage. But the ultimate impact was still that in 2003 the upper two quintiles bore 83% of the total tax burden; the lower two quintiles paid only 6%.
So what happened? The study was requested by congressional Democrats and, as is typical, the CBO briefed them on Wednesday. That left plenty of time for the Democrats to pick-and-choose among the results contained in pages and pages of tables covering 14 years and then spin the stuffing out of them. Just why the Washington press corps allowed itself to be spun, well, that's another story.