In the last three years the American public has watched its roaring economy flip-flop into recession. The news of companies filing for bankruptcy or laying workers off has become all too popular.

Liberals point their finger at President Bush and the Republicans for what they call “wasteful” tax cuts for the wealthy.

Conservatives, on the other hand, blame former President Clinton and the Democrats for a screwed-up tax code and funding of wasteful programs. Regardless of whose fault it might be, it is time we fix it.

And that’s exactly what the president is doing. He has begun campaigning to make the recent tax cuts permanent and possibly to put even more of the money Americans earn back into their own pockets through more tax cuts.

But as the idea of another tax cut becomes more real, beware of the lies from the left.

The first of the liberal lies places the blame for the slumping economy on the Bush tax cut. They say it was too big and now the government doesn’t have enough to do its job.

Yeah, right. Bush’s tax cut didn’t do anything to hurt the economy. Growth was slowing considerably before he even took office. Team that up with Sept. 11 and corporate scandal after corporate scandal, and you have yourself a mess. He’s the one doing something to get us out of that mess.

Another lie the left uses to combat tax cuts is a simple play on words. If the upper income brackets of the tax code are involved in the cuts they say the government is “giving money to the rich.” Nobody is having anything given to them. A tax cut lets people keep what was already theirs to begin with.

Yet another of the great lies says if we take money out of the federal budget for a tax cut, we will have to cut programs such as education, Medicare or Social Security.

This is nothing but a scare tactic, but people actually buy into it. When people get to keep more of their money, they spend more of their money. This creates the need for more workers in order to meet higher demands from consumers. That means more jobs. And what happens when more people are working? More people are paying taxes. In effect, the federal budget will grow.

And how about the class warfare lies? “Republicans want tax cuts for the wealthy to help their rich campaign donors.”

Give me a break. First of all, the Democrats raise about the same amount of money as the Republicans. They too have supporters who are rich. It is nothing more than an ideological difference. Liberals want to tax success, conservatives want to encourage it.

It is not a return for the support during the campaign. The wealthy are included in the cuts because they are the ones who pay the taxes.

We all remember Al Gore and his evil 1 percent. Most of us think of multi-millionaires being the top 1 percent. That’s the idea behind the lie. The truth is, according to IRS statistics, in the year 2000 (the latest year available) if you made $313,469 you were in the top 1 percent of wage-earners.

Here’s what else they don’t tell you about that evil 1 percent. They make 20.81 percent of the money in the United States, yet they pay 37.42 percent of the taxes. They are clearly being overtaxed.

But what about the other 99 percent of wage earners?

According to the IRS, in 2000 if you made $53,510 you were in the top 10 percent of wage-earners, who paid 67.3 percent of all income taxes. If you made at least $32,070, you were still in the top 25 percent, who paid 84.01 percent of all income taxes. And if you made $16,075 you were in the top 50 percent of wage earners, who are responsible for 96.09 percent of all income taxes.

This means for every $100 the government collects, half the country pays $96 while the other splits $4.

This brings us to the liberal lie of cutting taxes for the working class, or the poor and not the rich.

You can’t really do it if they don’t pay the taxes. Math just doesn’t work that way.

If we focused on cutting taxes for that bottom half of wage earners, we really wouldn’t be putting much money back into the economy. But if we include all taxpayers, we will all benefit from it.

Zach Calef

is a junior in apparel

merchandising, design and production from Cedar Rapids. He is a member of the Daily’s editorial board.