Obama and McCain's Tax Policies

Obama and McCain's Tax Policies - The Numbers

The Onion characterizes Bush's tax policy as follows:

One would hope McCain and Obama have better policies. As a "number's guy," I wanted to see real numbers showing how the tax proposals of the presidential candidates really look. Luckily, the Urban-Brooking Tax Policy Center has crunched the numbers and summarized their findings.

For the more graphically-inclined, this picture might help better.

2009

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2012

The bottomline is that Obama's plan clearly favors helping the poor and middle class while McCain's helps the rich a lot more than it does the poor. If an individual's tax burden is a key factor in determining who people vote for, I can't imagine 80+% of the country voting for McCain over Obama. In plain terms, Obama's plan favors 80+% of the population while McCain's fattens the richest 20%. Those who justify McCain's plan using principles of supply-side economics should realize that there are plenty of instances where those principles fail, the last 7 years being a prime example.

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