prez and veep taxes
bush and cheney published their taxes for 2007. well, most of them. cheney released his 1040 but no other schedules or forms. so i had to guess at what he might have paid in state and property taxes and mortgage interest. anywho, by timmer's method the bushes paid 26% and the cheneys paid somewhere around 24%. bush's rate was high because most of his income is his salary and they didn't have much long term capital gains. i read reports that the bushes had 220k in non-taxable income. either that's wrong or they decided to pay taxes on it. whatever. 10% of the cheneys income was non-taxable. both families made more than we did this year. and both paid a lower rate than we did. we are supposed to have a progressive tax system. if we really did have one cheney would have paid a higher rate than bush who would have paid a higher rate than we. say 32% for bush and 36% for cheney. do you think bush's lifestyle would be adversely affected if he took home $636k instead of $690k? be serious. cheney wouldn't even notice the difference between $2.2m instead of $2.5. but such a change would make a huge difference in say paying off our national debt and rebuilding our aging infrastructure and funding basic research.