Dept. of 2004 campaign hindsight

Posted July 8th, 2008 at 11:43 AM in Journalism, Politics

In Time’s Swampland blog, we’re reminded of a GOP argument about small business taxes that President George W. Bush used in 2004: that John Kerry wanted to raise taxes on small businesses, which employ an astoundingly high percentage of the American workforce. It took Jay Newton-Small one paragraph to debunk the argument:

Bush loved to cite on the stump the plight of the 4.1 million “subchapter S” companies – another catagory of small businesses that have less than 100 shareholders and pay individual income taxes. As my former Bloomberg colleague Ryan Donmoyer — the best tax reporter in town — pointed out, the argument was a bit ridiculous because less than 5% of small businesses who file under sub-chapter S made more than $200,000, Kerry’s threshold in 2004.

I know folks who voted for Bush over Kerry because of this argument. Those voters likely didn’t know that Kerry’s proposal would only affect the 5% of “subchapter S” companies making more than $200,000 per year.

Is that the Kerry campaign’s fault, for not defending its plan to raise taxes and communicating the details more effectively? No. Read the rest of this entry »

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