The last six years of fiscal policy under the Bush Administration have been a bad deal for 99 percent of Americans, according to two reports released last week by Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ). The first of the reports, The Bush Tax Cuts: Is Your State Better Off?, examines who in each state has benefited from Bush's tax policy. To more accurately represent the long-term effects of the tax cuts, the report not only shows the size of the tax breaks received by each income group, but also the disproportionate share of the increased national debt that each group must pay off. Each time Congress passed tax cuts over the last six years, it "paid for" these cuts by borrowing money - adding enormously to the national debt. To take that into account, CTJ makes the assumption that the additional debt added over the last 6 years will have to be paid back in the future through spending cuts and tax hikes on a broad range of taxpayers. From this vantage point, very few taxpayers came out ahead in the tax cuts. Generally, only the wealthiest 1 percent benefited at all. Ohio, for example, is still struggling to recover from the 2001 recession. Yet nearly all Ohioans except a wealthy few have received no net benefit from the tax cuts after increased national debt burdens are factored in. Moreover, the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers there got to keep 27 percent of the total amount of money released by the tax cut - far more than the entire bottom 60 percent, according to the CTJ report. In Michigan, where jobs are still being lost, the tax cuts have failed to bring relief to those who need it most. There, 99 percent of all taxpayers gain nothing from the tax cuts, while the richest 1 percent receives nearly 30 percent of the money from the tax cut. Unfortunately, this upward redistribution seems to have done little to stem the tide of lay-offs and job losses, particularly in the manufacturing sector. The second report, A Congressional Tax Report Card, is a companion piece to the first and breaks down the voting records of all current congressional representatives on tax policy over the last six years. Representatives and senators are graded based on how they voted on each of the major tax initiatives since 2001. For reference, the two senators from Ohio voted for the tax cuts an average of 70 percent of the time, while Michigan's senators voted against the tax cuts 90 percent of the time. The report card's introduction also provides a useful overview of the last six years in tax policy: Congress has cut corporate taxes three times, lowered income tax rates once, and twice moved to lower taxes on capital gains and dividends.