The Thinking Minority

My apologies, Rob, I posted without reading very carefully: there was a typo, it's actually 1.3 Trillion, not billion. Trillion. It was a big tax cut.

More details:

The tax cuts were $1.3 trillion. Trillion. Over 10 years. That's $130 billion per year, on average. There are 34.9 million Americans living below the poverty line. If you assume an average case -- a family of four -- then that means 8.725 million families earning less than $18,500 or so per year (from the 2003 Housing & Human Services guidelines for poverty).

So: $130 billion / 8.725 million = $14,899.71 per family.