By His Deeds Shall Ye Know Him

There are two basic ways to cover a presidency. One is to report the rhetoric, track the political ups and downs, and circulate the spin.

The other is to watch what the president is actually doing and report on the results.

There's a lot of the former, and remarkably little of the latter kind of coverage.

Reporting on results can take a lot of work, and the aforementioned rhetoric often gets in the way of a clear analysis. For instance, how much was President Bush personally responsible for taking the country to war under false pretenses, or for the botched response to Hurricane Katrina? To hear the White House tell it, it wasn't really his fault.

But once in a while along comes a story like the one in the New York Times this morning, by David Cay Johnston , which definitively examines the results of Bush's tax cut on investment income.

There have been three major Bush tax cuts for individuals. Bush twice reduced the top income tax rate, which is now 35 percent -- down from 39.6 percent.

Even more dramatically, Bush in 2003 reduced the top rate for most investment income to 15 percent -- down from 39.6 percent for dividends and 20 percent for profits on asset sales.

The result of that change? Johnston writes: "The first data to document the effect of President Bush's tax cuts for investment income show that they have significantly lowered the tax burden on the richest Americans, reducing taxes on incomes of more than $10 million by an average of about $500,000."

Wow. That's a lot of money.

"When Congress cut investment taxes three years ago, it was clear that the highest-income Americans would gain the most, because they had the most money in investments. But the size of the cuts and what share goes to each income group have not been known," Johnston writes.

"As Congress debates whether to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, The Times analyzed I.R.S. figures for 2003, the latest year available and the first that reflected the tax cuts for income from dividends and from the sale of stock and other assets, known as capital gains."

Another way to look at things: "Americans with annual incomes of $1 million or more, about one-tenth of 1 percent all taxpayers, reaped 43 percent of all the savings on investment taxes in 2003. The savings for these taxpayers averaged about $41,400 each."