litigated all the way up to the pennsylvania supreme court. >> as you look back now what does michael nutter think of the effort to cast that as john ashcroft trying to dictate the outcome? >> now we know that that story was a complete fabrication but in the moment it worked. but many of us knew that is really what was going on it was a heavily democratic city if they didn't like president bush they certainly didn't like john ashcroft so there was a narrative already made two or three days after that story everything was radio silently could figure out what was going on then they played out that scenario. >> you point out in the book a lot of people forgot the margin in that cycle was cast and bigger than four years prior. >> yes. with the 99 race margin was 9401 of the closest in modern history and then they won by 85000 it was an absurd number based on this whole fiction created about the republicans in washington trying to take down the black democratic mayor of philadelphia which then needs to the republicans winning pennsylvania in 2004 that was their theory which made no sense. >> summ

well, rendell's successor john street kept up the reductions as did his successor michael nutter, here's nutter addressing the city council with the 2015 working address >> we've lowered wage business taxes bringing the wage tax rate below 4% fors first time since the 1970 as much as >> i heard a variation of that line over and over and over past 20 years. philly mayors bragging about cutting taxes. here's the thing. reductions enacted by those mayors and city council were almost without exception comically pathetically tiny. from fiscal 2014 to 2015, for example, the resident wage tax rate dropped from 3.924% all the way to 3.920%. on an income of $50,000 per year, the tax savings would have been, $2. the next year, the tax saving on that 50 grand would have been $4.90. the year after that, another 4.90 and in fiscal 2018, the tax savings on the latest wage tax cut was $4.85. during this period of time, hungry taxpayers could have and likely did collect all of that wage tax savings, gather up their families, and gone out to buy a medium size chocolate milk shake with four straws, that w