Bush's Tax Increase
"It will raise people's taxes by $4-5,000 a year."

For those of us in the middle class, that's the bottom line of the Bush administration's proposal to eliminate the income tax and replace it with a national sales tax.

This estimate comes from Robert McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice, a tax watchdog organization that has been piling up the evidence that Bush's tax plans are nothing short of disaster for the nation. I chatted with McIntyre this afternoon and will post some more excerpts from our conversation this weekend, as I try to explore the ramifications of this proposal -- which are more profound than any domestic policy yet proposed by Bush, though it seems hardly anyone in either the press or the blogosphere has figured this out.

This is not merely a radical plan. It is one that will literally turn the nation's economic clock back to 1900 -- the days when the middle and lower classes were completely at the mercy of the nation's corporate leaders -- with a much lower standard of living, much longer hours for nominal pay, and virtually without any real upward social mobility.
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I think this issue is probably the most important one to pay *really* close attention. Orcinus is following this one closely.