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"It is being sold trough... "lies" is not quite the right word, because they are careful to phrase things so that they are literally true, just misleading. The scams are transparent, they are almost childish, it is hard to believe that anyone would dare to do such a thing.
One of the scams that is used is a variant of the old "When Bill Gates walks into a bar that makes everybody in the bar a billionaire, because once he's in the bar the average income of the people in the bar is a billion dollars".
That is exactly the logic that is used in the speeches, over and over again it says "93 million taxpayers will get an average tax break of 1083 dollars next year". Which is true. The problem is that the great bulk of that, is huge tax breaks for a few people at the top, and about 250 dollars for the person in the middle.
You have this image of 93 million people getting 1000 dollar checks, which is completely misleading. They didn't exactly say that because they don't want you to think that, and it is amazing that they can get away with it.
Another argument is that it's "for helping the elderly; most of the benefits of dividend tax exemption will go to older people". Which is true. That is if you look at multi-millionaires, you find they tend on average to be elderly. If you do the arithmetic, you find that 75% of elderly get zero. More broadly, for elderly Americans with an income of less then $50.000, a grand total of 4% of this tax break will go to them.
This is amazing, it is so transparent it's ridiculous."
rtsp://real.dialnsa.edu/REAL_BEARD/spring2003_events/schwartz.rm
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