Found buried at the bottom of a New York Times article headlined: “Tax Cuts Offer Most for Very Rich, Study Says”

The report shows that a comparatively small number of very wealthy households account for a very big share of total tax payments, and their share increased in the first four years after Mr. Bush’s tax cuts.

The top 1 percent of income earners paid about 36.7 percent of federal income taxes and 25.3 percent of all federal taxes in 2004. The top 20 percent of income earners paid 67.1 percent of all federal taxes, up from 66.1 percent in 2000, according to the budget office.

By contrast, families in the bottom 40 percent of income earners, those with incomes below $36,300, typically paid no federal income tax and received money back from the government. That so-called negative income tax stemmed mainly from the earned-income tax credit, a program that benefits low-income parents who are employed.

Put another way: rich families were the undisputed winners from President Bush’s tax cuts, but people in the bottom half of the earnings scale were not paying much in taxes anyway.

Got that?  Tax cuts favor the rich...but only because the rich pay the vast majority of taxes. When Democrats whine about “tax cuts for the rich” the reality is that “the rich” (or about the top 45% of wage-earners in America, a lot of whom probably don’t consider themselves rich) pay pretty much all of the income taxes.  Thus you cannot give a tax cut without benefiting the “rich” the most.

Democrats have to know this stuff, but choose their “tax cuts for the rich” rhetoric anyway.  Not, I believe, because they actually believe we can give tax relief to people who are already paying next to nothing in taxes but rather because they oppose any sort of tax relief in the first place.  But they don’t want to say that they oppose tax relief, so they just say that they oppose tax cuts for “the rich” which are pretty much the only sort of tax cuts we can do given the realities of the current system.