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Dear Chris Wallace: In your comment this morning, you stated that John Kerry was WRONG when he asserted that Mr. Bush's $84 income from a "timber company" was incorrect; it was an "oil and gas producing company." Your statement completely, perhaps intentionally, misses the larger point of Mr. Kerry's argument; that Bush's assertion that raising taxes on the wealthy would raise taxes on small businesses and hamper job production was false. Bush said there were 900,000 such businesses that would be affected. In reality, there are only 72,000 so-called "small" businesses who have EMPLOYEES who would be affected by this rollback of the Bush tax cut for the upper bracket elites. And if someone is reporting an income, including small business profits, of $200K, then that individual IS wealthy by normal standards, if not within the punditocracy. As a small businessman filing Subchapter S myself, I know that any small businessman could do things such as increase advertising, invest in improvements in plant and equipment or hire more people if he wanted to reduce the Form C income on his 1040 and keep himself out of the upper bracket. I assume any thinking small businessman would have already done that before coming out ahead by $200K. That means that "small" businessman is part of the elite and should pay more and get this nation back on a track to fiscal responsibility. Kerry's timber company example was designed to show that Bush was misleading the voters by wrongly counting people with ANY income from business ownership, whether they had employees or not, in his 900,000 figure. The fact of whether that income was from a timber company or an oil and gas company is irrelevant.
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