ECONOMY — ONE YEAR EXTENSION OF THE BUSH TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH COSTS $36 BILLION, BENEFITS 2 PERCENT OF AMERICANS: This week, the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) released an analysis of what would happen to the tax code if the conservative proposal to extend all of the Bush tax cuts were to be adopted. The tax cuts are currently scheduled to expire at the end of the year, and the Obama administration has proposed renewing only those for the lower- and middle-class. “You will find Republicans resisting very strongly any bill that allows taxes to be raised on any segment of Americans today,” said Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), while Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) has said the House GOP will throw “everything we’ve got” into preserving the tax cuts for the wealthy. And too many Democrats — like Sens. Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Kent Conrad (D-ND) — have been cowed into expressing a willingness to extend the tax cuts temporarily for a year or two. According to the JCT analysis, extending the cuts for the wealthy — which affects only two percent of the population — for just one year will cost $36 billion. Obama’s plan, meanwhile, focuses the tax increase on the very top of the income scale. The 608,000 taxpayers who make between $500,000 and $1 million “would pay $6.5 billion more, or an average of almost $10,000″ and the 315,000 taxpayers who earn more than $1 million would “owe $31 billion more, or almost $100,000 on average.” Even under Obama’s plan, the very rich will be paying less in taxes than they did in 2001, since they would be paying a lower marginal rate on their first $250,000 in income. As the Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo writes, “It’s worth remembering that income inequality is currently the worst it has been since the 1920s. The richest one percent of households now receive nearly 25 percent of the country’s income, after earning less than 10 percent in the 1970s.”