Your Tax Dollars at Work

Generating talking points for the Bush Campaign, via the WSJ (subscription required):

WASHINGTON — The Treasury tapped civil servants to calculate the cost of Sen. John Kerry’s tax plan and then posted the analysis on the Treasury Web site. A federal law bars career government officials from working on political campaigns.

The Treasury analysis doesn’t mention Mr. Kerry by name. Rather it sketches out the potential cost of a tax plan that rolls back tax reductions for taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 — the nub of the Democratic presidential candidate’s plan. The result, the Treasury said in the analysis posted March 22, would be a tax increase of as much as $477 billion over 10 years on “hardworking individuals and married couples.” The same day, the Republican National Committee issued a press release in which it unveiled what it called its “John Kerry $pendometer,” and cited the same $477 billion figure as the cost of “raising taxes on the top income bracket.”

AB