If you’ve been following the election, then you know that John Kerry has pledged not only to preserve present middle-class tax cuts, but to augment them with targeted cuts, like tax breaks for people trying to send their kids to college. For wealthy people–himself included–on the other hand, he has promised to roll back the tax cuts for the rich, to pay for incidentals like Education and Health Care.

George Bush, on the other hand, has made no secret of his intent to protect, prolong and increase his tax cuts for the rich–and has done so by throwing meaningless bones to the middle class, and by fooling people of modest means that his tax cuts are somehow aimed at them. And many are happy with their tax cuts, despite having them wholly cancelled out by under-the-radar costs such as high energy prices, large cuts in government services, lower salaries and wages, and local and state tax hikes to pay for lower federal assistance.

Bush continued that streak by making two incredibly outrageous statements yesterday. First was his statement that Kerry’s tax rollbacks for the rich would hit small business owners because, and I quote, “the rich in America happen to be the small business owners.” Come again? Small business owners comprise the “rich” population in the U.S.? Give me a break. And Bush’s awareness of that lie can be easily tested by asking him to limit his tax cuts to people earning over $200,000 to only the owners of small businesses. See how fast he dumps that possibility.

But then Bush went further. He said that raising taxes on wealthy people has failed in the past because, and again I quote, “the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway.” So his official position is to give tax cuts to the rich because they’ll find a way to get the money illegally anyway?

I am reminded of an old political cartoon I saw in a book many years ago. The cartoon was published about a century ago, and featured two overweight men, dressed in coats and top hats–the obligatory rich-guy getup in comics–both laughing hysterically at a piece of paper one of them is holding, on which is printed three words: “tax the rich.” It apparently was as true back then as it is today, and this spirit lives on in the Bush administration.

The truth is, under the Bush administration, the IRS has been morphed into a “give the rich anything they want” agency. This policy of letting wealthy people get off without paying has even gone beyond helping them establish foreign-based offices so they can escape paying taxes in the U.S., they also help out people who can not or do not take that particular out.

22-year senior IRS auditor Remy Welling is now risking a jail sentence to make the people aware of this tacit assistance to the rich. She has blown the whistle on this practice, citing the specific case of Silicon Valley corporation Micrel, which the IRS secretly helped to avoid paying $51 million in taxes it was legally bound to pay–and then additionally helped the top executives get an additional $20 million by keeping information secret from its shareholders. Welling found this out when she was given the case and told that the IRS settled the deal before an audit of the company even began. And these guys are not “small business owners.”

Under the Bush administration, face-to-face tax audits on corporations have been slashed in half. $311 billion in owed tax revenue went uncollected last year, nearly two-thirds of the current budget deficit.

This is not just giving tax breaks to the rich, this is the Bush IRS practically handing cash to rich people at the expense of middle-class taxpayers. That’s how much he “supports” the working American.