Estimated Tax Savings of Bush Cabinet Under the New Tax Law

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20500

September 4, 2003

Dear President Bush:

It has been reported that the savings accruing to your vice president and your cabinet members from the recent legislation reducing taxes (mostly on the wealthy) are substantial. As the attached analysis demonstrates, based on latest financial reports, the estimated tax savings from capital gains and dividends is at a minimum average of $42,158 per member to as high as $167,284 per member, per year.

Very few people are in a position to be a sine qua non for tax laws that give themselves a tax cut. You signed the legislation into law and your top associates urged its passage. Let us say that the situation calls for a special moral imperative for you, Mr. Cheney and your cabinet members to refuse publicly to take the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in lower taxes. Such a decision would remove a clear conflict of interest and establish an honorable precedent for your successors.

There is, moreover, an additional challenge which you need to confront if you decline the aforementioned option. The moral authority to govern involves setting a good example. Over and over again you argued through the mass media that your tax cuts (2001 and 2003) would produce two consequences: first, that taxpayers would be spending more of the savings in the marketplace and thereby increase consumer demand and economic growth, and second, that taxpayers would also, in the aggregate, invest more of their money in the economy leading to expansion on the supply side of the market (the proverbial “plant and equipment and jobs” argument).

So, how are you, Mr. Cheney, and your top appointed officials planning to use your tax savings from the 2003 tax cut, given your public predictions regarding the uses of these tax cuts by the American people? Are you going to increase your spending and/or are you going to increase your investments? Notice the key word here is “increase” which is at the core of your declarations that the tax cut will increase economic growth and jobs.

You and your high Administration officials have already benefitted from the 2001 tax cut. How did you and your associates increase your spending or investments, if at all?

Should you decide it is too burdensome to assemble responses from your top appointed officials (despite the deep interest by the questioning public in their responses), at the very least, place before the American taxpayers your response and that of Vice President Cheney.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader
P.O. Box 19312
Washington, D.C. 20036
Enclosed- Estimated Tax Savings of Bush Cabinet Under the New Tax Law (pdf) – http://www.nader.org/releases/2003TaxCutCabinetSavings.pdf