High taxes don't make poor people rich, and they don't make rich people any poorer. All they serve to do is redistribute income and buy votes. The fact is, in the U.S., 96% of taxes are paid by the top 50% of wage earners; The bottom 50% only pay 4%. Well, the government now has more money than it has things to spend it on. Guess what? All the excess money? It belongs to the people who earned it. Would you suggest that someone other than the people who paid the excess taxes in the first place get the refund? As for those who would say that the surpluses are predicted to be less that what we first thought, and that the tax rebate will eat the surplus up and then some: Tell the politicians to vote to raise the taxes again they need the extra money! Oh, but that would be political suicide, right? Well then, they need to learn to budget what we already give them. In America, the government derives it's rights from the people, not vice-versa. The taxes we give to government should be seen as it's "allowance", and should be budgeted accordingly. As for the "widening gap" between rich and poor, the calculations used to divide Americans into the 5 economic categories (Poor, Lower-Middle Class, Middle Class, Upper-Middle Class, Upper Class) are fundamentally flawed, in the sense that they doesn't keep track of those who move up from one class to the next. If someone was "poor" one year, then gets a better job and becomes, say, "middle class", then he isn't counted as a "poor" person who moved up and narrowed his personal gap between the rich and poor; Instead, he's now on the other side of the widening gap. One other thing to consider: The "poor" people in the studies I've seen are considered as such based on annual income, not accumulated wealth. There are thousands and thousands of people with accumulated wealth who no longer draw a paycheck, because they don't have to.

As for the truly "poor" people, I indeed have a certain amount of sympathy for them. This sympathy however, stops just short of the lottery ticket counter, just before the beer aisle, right around the corner from the cigarette counter, five minutes before the unprotected sex that leads to the kid they can't afford to raise, and about two days before they dropped out of school. This isn't the case for every poor person, but living in North Alabama, I see the gap every day: A bizarre juxtaposition between engineers who worked and studied their collective butts off (NASA & the computer industry are big in Huntsville) and trailer park folk who made bad decisions.

***For anyone who's interested, this year's "Personal Income Freedom Day" came on July 6. This is the day on which the average American begins working for money he gets to keep, rather than for money that goes to some form of government (Federal tax, State tax, Local taxes, Social Security taxes, Sales taxes, Property Taxes, etc, etc, etc).

This day comes later each year. When it makes it to September, we're knocking on socialism's door. (And yes, I do say that like it's a bad thing.)