Washington, D.C.—Last night, Dino Rossi officially became the Republican Senate candidate in Washington state. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) has embraced the Obama administration’s proposal to allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans to expire, while renewing those for the lower and middle class. Rossi, though, wants to extend all of the cuts, saying that allowing those for the rich to expire is a “class warfare program.”
Rossi argued that 2.5 million people in Washington benefit from the 2001 Bush tax cuts, the extension of which will be a major issue in Congress this fall. Rossi described as “this class warfare program” the Obama administration’s plan to extend the cuts enjoyed by middle-income taxpayers, while repealing tax cuts for high-income households.
There are about 6.7 million people in Washington state, so for Rossi’s number to be accurate, he’s either claiming that Obama and Murray want to raise taxes on people that they don’t, or he is claiming that more than one-third of the state’s population is making more than $200,000 per year. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are 105,209 households in the state that would be affected by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts (or about 1.6 percent of the total population). So Rossi inflated his state’s wealthy population by 24 times. Also, as The Wonk Room explains, Rossi’s push to extend the tax cuts for the rich would definitely help one Washingtonian: Dino Rossi.
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