The Candidates’ Tax Plans: Both Are Perhaps Unworkable, but McCain’s Is a Fraud

Taxes are a perennial hot campaign issue. It’s therefore no wonder that both Barack Obama and John McCain are seeking to use it to their own advantage.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center looked at the candidates’ plans, and stated that both may be unworkable since deficits are already astronomical. There’s not much room for a “tax cut” when current rates of taxation are already accompanied by enormous deficits.

McCain’s plan, however, is the more costly. McCain’s ads are deceptive, if not outright fraudulent. In them, he repeatedly invokes time-tested theme of “the-Democrats-are-out-to-raise-your-taxes” and claims that he alone can save working families from a higher tax burden. It’s a lie, pure and simple.

In reality, McCain is taking a page from the familiar George W. Bush playbook: give tiny, token tax relief to the middle class while reserving all the real goodies for the ultra-rich.

[T]he Obama plan would give households in the bottom fifth of the income distribution an average tax cut of 5.5 percent of income ($567) in 2009, while those in the middle fifth would get an average cut of 2.6 percent of income ($1,118). “Your taxes” would go up, yes — but not if you’re someone who is sweating higher gas prices. By contrast, Mr. McCain’s tax plan would give those in the bottom fifth of income an average tax cut of $21 in 2009. The middle fifth would get $325 — less than a third of the Obama cut. The wealthiest taxpayers make out terrifically.

Any tax relief for the wealthy will only make the system more blatantly unfair, since we already have an extremely regressive income tax in which the effective taxation rates are much lower for the very wealthy than they are for average working Americans.