McCain's ads have been hitting hard on taxes, suggesting that Obama wants to raise taxes for ordinary Americans in the middle class. As noted here before, it's just plain wrong to suggest that Obama supports raising taxes on ordinary Americans. Obama has made clear that he wants to extend tax cuts for the middle class beyond 2010 and permit the Bush cuts to die only for those making $250,000 or more. Citizens for Tax Justice has estimated that for 2008, about 3.2% of taxpayers would have adjusted gross income greater than $200,000 and only 2.1% would have AGI greater than $250,000. See Who's Rich, January 2008.
It is problematic for the media--and often people like me who talk about these issues all the time--to start thinking of taxpayers with incomes in those ranges as "middle class". The media started to talk that way in discussing the annual AMT patches, which save huge amounts of taxes that would otherwise be due under the AMT for those whose AGI is between $200,000 and $500,000 and quite small amounts for those in the lower income brackets. (I've fallen into the trap myself, when I glossed over the fact that Joe Biden with his annual income in the hundreds of thousands is indeed rich, in a posting about his charitable contributions.) Those with incomes of a couple of hundred thousand a year or more are, in fact, among the rich in this country, even though they don't have the unseemly extraordinary incomes of the CEOs and hedge fund managers with their multimillion dollar annual salaries. So all but the rich would be protected from the expiration of the Bush tax cuts under Obama's proposals.
Citizens for Tax Justice released a fact sheet making it clear that McCain's charges are misleadingly (intentionally) wrong. See Obama's Tax Cuts Would Go to the Middle Class; McCain's Would Go to the Wealthy. Over at ThinkProgress, they noted that even Fox News has found McCain's campaign has gone too far beyond truthiness in its ads' tax portrayals of Obama. See McCain Loses Fox News: Megyn Kelly Rips McCain Flack, Sept. 15. Yet the ads are still running. I saw one of the ads last night targeted at Michigan voters, based entirely on misrepresentation of the Obama position. Hopefully, American voters are wise to this tactic of stretching the truth to the point of being very close to an outright lie, and they will simply tune out these bad ads.
Update 9/30/08: See also Rohter, Misleading Claims by McCain on Obama's Tax Plan, New York Times, Sept. 29, 2008
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