Andrews added that "two of (the president's) signature measures, tax cuts on investment income and a steady reduction of estate taxes, overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest households."

That sentence is half irrelevant, half mistaken.

The CBO does not attempt to assign the estate tax by income group. To do that they would have to know who received the money, not who died. Dead people cannot receive more income, before or after taxes, which is just one reason why death is a highly undesirable tax avoidance strategy. If Hugh Jassets dies and leaves $10 million to be split among 10 young grandchildren, those youngsters are likely to be either invisible or poor in terms of income showing up in CBO tax data.

Second, taxes on capital gains and dividends are surprisingly hard on older retirees with low incomes. Those with incomes below $15,000 paid over 7 percent of the federal taxes on dividends in 2002, and those with incomes below $200,000 paid 62 percent of that tax.

Third, lower tax rates on taxable dividends and capital gains generally result in investors paying more taxes on their investment income, not less. Nobody has to hold dividend-paying stock in a taxable account, and nobody has to report capital gains by selling assets from a taxable account. The amount of dividend income reported to the IRS doubled from 2002 to 2004. Upper-income taxpayers are bound to be reporting relatively less income from tax-exempt bonds than they did before 2003. Moving income from nontaxable to taxable investments looks like an increase in top incomes in the CBO estimates, but it isn't.

There has been a lot of chatter lately about raising Social Security taxes only on those with incomes above $100,000 while also cutting that same group's Social Security benefits again (their benefits were deeply slashed in 1993 through an extra tax on benefits). Can anyone really pretend that sounds "fair"?

The CBO calculates the effective tax rate for all federal taxes -- including Social Security and Medicare taxes, income taxes and excise taxes. For the bottom 80 percent as a group, that total federal tax fell from 14.1 percent in 2000 to 11.4 percent in 2004 -- a 19.1 percent tax cut. The tax cut was deepest among the poorest fifth (29.7 percent), largely because of the Bush administration's refundable tax credit for children. For the middle fifth, the total tax rate fell from 16.6 percent to 13.9 percent -- a 16.3 percent cut. As for the top 1 percent, their overall tax rate was merely trimmed from 33 percent to 31.1 percent -- a 5.8 percent cut

A truly courageous (willing to be fired) ombudsman of The New York Times would insist on the following correction to Andrews' upside-down article:

"Households earning more than $266,800 a year saw their federal tax rates drop less sharply than any other group in the country as a result of President Bush's tax cuts, according to a new Congressional Budget Office study."