120,000

Must read: Paul Krugman's excellent breakdown of the Bush tax cuts and the debate over making them permanent. He touches on the history of the tax cuts (pushed through Congress in 2001), remarks on what he sees as the hypocrisy of conservatives who bicker over $26 billion recovery packages but think that yanking $680 billion in federal revenue is totally fine, and, most importantly, shreds the mythology surrounding who will actually benefit from the tax cuts:

And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few — the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year — would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.

Or, as he writes earlier in the piece - this cut will only impact the 120,000 wealthiest Americans. 120,000. That's smaller than the population of the city where I live.

So please, remember in the next few months, as various TV screaming heads and politicians desperately trying to get elected try to frighten you into thinking that your taxes are going to skyrocket: 120,000. None of whom are you.