Kerry says that the Congressional Budget Office "documents what others and I have been saying for months.

* Kerry says that the Congressional Budget Office "documents what others and I have been saying for months. The tax burden of middle-class Americans has gone up, while the tax burden of the wealthiest people has gone down. That is wrong. That is morally wrong, and it's wrong from a policy point of view in America, and we have to change it." It is also wrong in the simpler sense of being factually mistaken. The CBO analysis says that middle-class Americans have seen their federal tax burden go down. It also says that they are paying a larger proportion of all federal revenues. There are two reasons for this change. A progressive tax code almost guarantees that when incomes fall, as in a recession, the share of taxes paid by the rich will go down. (Think about it this way: Assume that the richest fifth of Americans in 2001 were still the richest fifth in 2004--but now, many of them have dropped down a tax bracket.) Second, Bush reduced the income tax while not reducing the payroll tax. Since the income tax is highly progressive while the payroll tax is not, an even, across-the-board reduction in the income tax will make the total federal tax burden less progressive. Note also the sleight of hand going on here. Liberals act as though Bush is an enemy of the worker because he has not cut the payroll tax. But what would happen if he did propose to cut it? Let's say that he proposed to let people keep some of their payroll taxes as long as they kept the difference in a savings account. In fact, Bush has proposed exactly that. The liberals' reaction has been to flay him for endangering Social Security, which the payroll tax funds. They want to have it every which way, depending on the political needs of the moment.