In a letter to the editor printed Thursday, Kevin Kedzior advises a columnist to “get your facts straight” and “think with your head, not your heart.” Good idea. Even better if he would follow his own advice. His figures on the top 1 percent of income earners are mostly wrong and seriously incomplete. His claim that lowering individual taxes on the rich will result in more jobs is the old trickle-down economics of two decades ago – a politically-motivated theory with virtually no empirical data to back it up. In other words – no head, just heart.

In 2001, the 1,288,000 people in the top 1 percent of adjusted gross income had an average AGI of just slightly more than $1,000,000, not $300,000. They paid an average of just more than $300,000 each. Yes, in aggregate this group paid almost 34 percent of their million-dollar-apiece income, but their aggregate income is 17.5 percent. So, for this group: about one-sixth of the total income in the country, about one-third of the total taxes. That doesn’t add up to the overburdened rich Kedzior portrays. Poor babies – gotta scrape by on $700,000 after taxes.

The unemployment rate of 5.4 percent, better than the 5.6 percent of the Clinton years, sounds great – until you look at the other facts. Unemployment figures ignore the percentage of people who have given up and people whose jobs are forced part time; Bush is on track to be the first president since Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs; and a huge proportion of those shiny new jobs are lousy jobs with low salary and few or no benefits.

So how about more facts instead of claims to being fact-based, Mr. Kedzior?

H. Joel Jeffrey

Professor, computer science