aka “You take our breath away.”

Reprehensibly: That’s beyond revoltingly rich, and with a twist: it’s richesse at the expense of everybody and everything else, self-indulgent, spoonfed government dole-out wealth on an IRS silver platter. These are the same folks already getting exponentially greater boon to their ledgers from everything the government provides and not wanting to pay their share for it…

This jawdropping set of figures released yesterday might have left me speechless were it not for the White House’s salt in the wound that sputters me here. As per usual with this era’s “news,” there’s nothing surprising in it really at all, and yet it’s rejoltingly stunning all the same.

The key lines , imo, are:

…Total income listed on tax returns grew every year after World War II, with a single one-year exception, until 2001, making the five-year period of lower average incomes and four years of lower total incomes a new experience for the majority of Americans born since 1945.

The growth in total incomes was concentrated among those making more than $1 million. The number of such taxpayers grew by more than 26 percent, to 303,817 in 2005, from 239,685 in 2000.

These individuals, who constitute less than a quarter of 1 percent of all taxpayers, reaped almost 47 percent of the total income gains in 2005, compared with 2000.

People with incomes of more than a million dollars also received 62 percent of the savings from the reduced tax rates on long-term capital gains and dividends that President Bush signed into law in 2003, according to a separate analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, a group that points out policies that it says favor the rich.

The group’s calculations showed that 28 percent of the investment tax cut savings went to just 11,433 of the 134 million taxpayers, those who made $10 million or more, saving them almost $1.9 million each. Over all, this small number of wealthy Americans saved $21.7 billion in taxes on their investment income as a result of the tax-cut law.

The nearly 90 percent of Americans who make less than $100,000 a year saved on average $318 each on their investments. They collected 5.3 percent of the total savings from reduced tax rates on investment income.

Nearly half of Americans reported incomes of less than $30,000, and two-thirds make less than $50,000.

The number of taxpayers making more than $100,000 grew by nearly 3.4 million and accounted for more than two-thirds of the growth in the number of returns filed in 2005 compared with those in 2000.

…

Robert S. McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice, said that even though he expected a few very wealthy people to reap most of the tax savings generated by lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains, the size of the savings “still takes your breath away.”

He said the tax savings at the top, combined with lower average incomes after five years, “shows that trickle down doesn’t work.”

And here’s the kicker:

The White House said the fact that average incomes were smaller five years after the Internet bubble burst “should not surprise anyone.”

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, attributed the drop in average incomes to “the significant wrenching hits that our economy took in 2001 and 2002, so no one should be surprised that what a bubble economy created in the late 1990s and 2000, where economic data were skewed, would take some time to recover.”

Mr. Fratto said the fact that nearly all of the growth in incomes was among those in the upper reaches of the income ladder and that the majority of investment tax breaks went to those making more than $1 million “is not a very interesting story.”

“There is no question that you will always have distributional concerns with a tax rate, a broad-based tax rate, at the very top of the income scale,” Mr. Fratto said.

“…not a very interesting story.” Well, isn’t that special?

You wouldn’t be wanting to dissuade reporters from such things as comparing the names of these $10-million folks with donors to Bush/Cheney, now would you, Mr. Fratto? Or otherwise shining the limelight on the great profiteers of Bush tax cuts?

I’m guessing it depends on the definition of “interesting.” I’ll bet there are as many as 11,433 “interesting” stories there.

Not to mention the mega-story of what their newfound largesse means for the next generations picking up the tab and all the current folk doing without.

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