Newt Gingrich's Tax Cut for the Rich in a Very, Very Tall Graph

Have you heard about Newt Gingrich's tax plan? It gives millionaires an average $600,000 tax break and adds $1 trillion to the federal deficit in a single year. In other words, it's just like most of the GOP presidential tax plans out there, as Republicans continue their race to see who can come up with the biggest tax cuts possible for millionaires.

In the Tax Policy Center's analysis of Gingrich's plan to create an optional 15 percent flat tax for families, the nonpartisan group found that the top 0.1 percent (who make an average of more than $8 million) "would get about a quarter of the windfall." Low-income families would choose to stick with the Bush/Obama tax cuts. The rich could take shelter in a new Gingrich plan that would make their investments tax free and cut effective rates on their income by half. Here's a graph compiled with TPC data that shows tax savings along the Y-axis for certain incomes groups listed along the X-axis. (Scroll down to read more analysis.)


Below, I've included similarly long graphs that sum up the tax savings under Herman Cain and Rick Perry's plans. The bottom line here is not simply that graphing technology can create fun, scrollable blue columns. It's that, at a time when reasonable liberals and conservatives are having an honest debate about how to rescue the middle class, Gingrich, Cain, and Perry have proposed plans that would shrink government revenue by nearly half and confer hundreds of thousands of dollars to the richest Americans. As I've written before: a $500,000 tax cut for millionaires isn't a bug of Perry's or Cain's or Gingrich's tax plan. It is the plan.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/newt-gingrichs-tax-cut-for-the-rich-in-a-very-very-tall-graph/249878/