Calculating the cost of the Bush tax cuts

How much tax revenue has the United States lost due to the Bush tax cuts — and how much have top earners benefited? Working with Citizens for Tax Justice, a left-leaning advocacy group for progressive taxation, the National Priorities Project has created an online, running calculator that captures this mounting number each second. The group casts the figure as a “cost” in terms of lost government revenue, though it’s also the amount of money these individual taxpayers have saved.

According to Eric Toder, co-director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the figures “seem to be in the right ballpark,” in line with TPC’s own estimate of how much the top 1 percent and 5 percent of U.S. households benefitted from the Bush tax cuts. Here’s a screenshot from Friday afternoon, but go to the Web site directly to get a better (and more current) picture:
(Source: National Priorities Project)