This Opinion Journal (non-payment registration required, hat-tip Verdon) piece is on Mr. The Duck’s tax plan. Under the Duck plan, a married couple with one child an an annual income of $40,000 would pay $1400 more in taxes. The marriage penalty would be reinstated against all taxation-theory sense, and even the lowest bracket of the tax scale would have a five percentage point hike in their rates (from 10% to 15%, or a 50% increase [Thanks to Bret for correcting my arithmetic]). Let’s go to the video…err…text:

Let’s look at real-life examples of what the Dean tax might mean for you. Under current law, a married couple with one child and a $40,000-a-year income pays income taxes of $1,503. Under the Dean tax, that family would pay $2,935–or just about double. For a family with two kids and an income of $80,000 a year, the extra Dean tax costs $1,780 a year. What Mr. Dean has never had to answer to in the Democratic primary, perhaps because the other candidates are too embarrassed to ask, is how a presidential contender whose campaign is dedicated to relieving the economic squeeze on working class families, believes that socking these folks with a $1,400- to $1,800-a-year tax hike will make their financial situation less stressful.

The bit about his plan “raising incomes” and “creating jobs” is particularly hillarious. Anybody with any understanding of post-Keynesian macroeconomics knows better than that, hell, even Keynes knew better than that. I guess Mr. The Duck stopped reading at Veblen.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 2nd, 2004 at 16:15 by Timothy and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.