For married couples with children in the middle fifth of the income distribution
($66,904), the same EPI paper estimates that inflation-adjusted income fell
$2,119 from 2000 to 2003 before taxes, but by only $83 after taxes. This "average family" received a $2,036 tax cut, even after adjusting for inflation and accounting for higher state and local taxes. Kerry obviously prefers to talk about a $1,500 decline in pre-tax "wages."

Last month, Kerry said: "Today, the tax code actually does something that's right. It actually gives tax breaks to companies that export American products. If they sell more products overseas and create jobs here at home, they pay lower taxes so they can grow and expand and hire more people. Sounds like a pretty good idea, right? But George W. Bush doesn't think so."

Actually, it was the World Trade Organization that didn't think this was a good idea. Those special tax breaks for favored exporters were banned, and the WTO invited Europe to impose retaliatory tariffs that recently reached 15 percent on 1,600 U.S. exports, including such vital Midwestern products as machine tools. Kerry's "good idea" has been crippling exports from Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan. Doesn't Kerry know this? If not, how does he dare use the word "incompetence" when talking about anybody else?

To fix that painful trade war, which has lately been injuring many U.S. manufacturers, the president recently signed a major new corporate tax law. It cuts the corporate tax from 35 percent to 32 percent on U.S. industry, broadly defined, and also provides a one-year tax holiday to repatriate earnings from foreign subsidiaries by paying a 5.25 percent U.S. tax (on top of the foreign tax). Stingy versions of those two changes had been sweeteners in Kerry's otherwise poisonously anti-corporate tax scheme. But those two unoriginal proposals have now been trumped by actual law.

Doesn't Kerry know the corporate tax law has changed? The new tax law has now made the only palatable features of the Kerry-Edwards plan instantly obsolete. Yet Kerry and Edwards carry on as if nothing has happened.