Scary-looking chart -- until you realize that (a) It's for ten years down the road, which means it's fantasy; and (b) the real numbers aren't as severe as the graphic scale makes it appear. The worst decrease is 1.5 percent, which is significant but not earth shattering. (For someone earning $20,000, it's $30. Give up smoking and you get that back in a week.) And as for the rich getting richer? The biggest gain is 0.6 percent, for people making over $1 million. Anyone earning over a million bucks isn't going to be significantly affected by saving $6,000 on their taxes.
I hate it when politicians use graphically enhanced graphics to "prove" their point. Graphics are meant to illustrate a point, not to obfuscate it. The Y axis on that chart is percent. Percent runs a scale of 0 to 100 -- so an honest chart will show the entire range of the Y axis, all the way up to 100 percent (both plus and minus). When you do that, that individual bars look a LOT less intimidating.
Fire up Excel, enter the numbers, and create a bar chart using the full 0 - 100 range for the Y axis and see how it looks ...
