Interestin Extract from IBD, Nov. 29, 2012

I don't swear numbers cannot be juggled, but: the following was copied from Investor's Business Daily. 

It's been more than 10 years since President Bush signed his first round of tax cuts into law. And in the years since, those cuts have been the source of constant attacks. Critics charge they gave away too much to the rich, exploded the deficit, contributed to income inequality, did little to spur economic growth, and so on.
President Obama has for years attacked the Bush cuts, and demanded that the top two income tax brackets return to Clinton-era levels.
But a decade of debate and discussion has managed to shed little light on what the Bush tax cuts actually did.
So as the debate heats up once again as part of the "fiscal cliff" negotiations, it's worth taking the time to highlight some of the things most people never knew about the Bush-era tax cuts.
The rich paid more. Despite endless claims by critics that Bush's tax cuts favored the rich, the fact is the rich ended up paying more in taxes after they went into effect.
In fact, IRS data show that the richest 1% paid $84 billion more in taxes in 2007 than they had in 2000 — that's a 23% increase — even though their average tax rate went down.
What's more, their share of the overall income tax burden grew, climbing from 37% in 2000 to 40% in 2007.
At the other end of the spectrum, the bottom half of taxpayers paid $6 billion less in income taxes in 2007 than they had seven years earlier — a 16% drop — and their share of the total income tax burden dropped from 3.9% to 2.9%.
Millions dropped from the tax rolls entirely. Another unheralded feature of the Bush tax cuts is that they pushed nearly 8 million people off the tax rolls entirely because, among other things, Bush doubled the per-child tax credit to $1,000 and lowered the bottom rate to 10%.
The Tax Foundation estimated that these changes benefited modest-income married couples with children, who were the ones most likely to fall from the tax rolls.
The tax cuts didn't cause the massive deficits. Critics routinely blame the Bush tax cuts for turning surpluses late in the Clinton administration to huge deficits under Bush. Not true.
In August 2001, after the first round of the Bush tax cuts were in place, the CBO projected a surplus of $176 billion in fiscal year 2002, with surpluses continuing to grow in the following years.

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