“The point the president was making is that there is not a tax cut that has been enjoyed by such a broad section of the population,” an administration official said, pointing to a report that said that 95 percent of working families received some kind of tax cut under the Making Work Pay provision in his stimulus bill.
Huh?
In other words, this isn’t about the size of the tax cut, but about the fact that the White House says that every working family, except those making more than $190,000, received as much as $800 in tax cuts.
That strikes us as a very odd way to claim “the biggest,” but maybe that’s because Obama can’t make that claim. We ran the numbers every which way, but the fairest over time is to look at the tax cut as a percentage of national income (gross domestic product minus depreciation.)
John F. Kennedy seems to win the prize for biggest tax cut, at least in the past half century. By the same measure, the income tax provisions of the George W. Bush tax cuts are more than twice as large as Obama’s tax cut over the same three-year time span. (Yes, a large portion of Bush’s tax cut went to the wealthy, but it also benefited the working poor. We still don’t know what Obama means by “middle class,” since his definition also seems to include the working poor.)
full:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/fact-checker-obamas-tax-cut-claim/2011/09/09/gIQAY2PNIK_story.html