As the Presidential season continues, and the economy on every taxpayer’s mind, the candidates tax views are continuing to get attention in the media. Please enjoy the following excepts from recent coverage, and click the respective titles to read the full articles.
Poll shows Obama with economy edge
More Americans believe Sen. Barack Obama is better suited to handle the No. 1 issue on voters' minds — the country's economic woes – than his likely rival in the fall election, Sen. John McCain.
In what could be a warning sign for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, a new poll released by CNN and the Opinion Research Corporation found that 50 percent of registered voters nationwide say the Illinois senator would best handle the economy, while only 44 percent said the same for McCain.
Obama, Democrats Embrace Fog of Complex Tax Plans: Amity Shlaes
Welcome to the new era of tax intelligence. If a tax idea doesn't sound as if it were written in a seminar at Swarthmore College, it is stupid. The more complex, the better.
Democrats are adroit at developing such proposals. The party appears to favor plans that serve at least two seemingly unrelated ends: We should punish oil companies while soothing middle-class mothers (windfall-profits-tax revenue plan). And we should curtail carbon emissions while paying tribute to the glories of the free market (cap-and-trade legislation).
McCain calls Obama tax plan a threat to all Americans
A day after Senator Barack Obama launched a broad assault on the economic plan of presidential rival John McCain, McCain hit back yesterday by asserting that Obama's tax proposals would ensnare millions of ordinary Americans and further weaken the economy.
McCain, speaking to small-business leaders in Washington, D.C., said Obama's plans to restore higher tax rates for upper-bracket taxpayers, increase the capital gains tax rate for the richest families, and possibly raise the cap on Social Security taxes would affect not just the wealthy, but also moderate-income voters and independent businesses.
Obama Fires Back on Taxes
Barack Obama dismissed as old-style politics John McCain's and the Republican Party's warnings that he would be a tax-and-spend liberal. Most Americans, Sen. Obama said, would pay lower taxes if he were elected president.
The presumed Democratic nominee, taking questions from reporters Tuesday, also indicated he would raise the 15% capital-gains tax on the income from sales of investments to about 20% – not the near-doubling to 28% that Republicans and others have warned Sen. Obama would seek and would put the economy at some risk by doing so.
McCain Camp Distorts Obama's Tax Policies, Exaggerates Their Adverse Impact
Sen. John McCain's camp is attempting to convince Americans that their taxes will increase dramatically with Sen. Barack Obama as president. The presumptive Republican nominee has repeatedly said that Obama would enact "the largest tax increase since the Second World War." A surrogate for McCain, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, insists that Obama has not proposed "a single tax cut" and wants to "raise every tax in the book."
A Preliminary Analysis of the 2008 Presidential Candidates' Tax Plans
If enacted, the Obama and McCain tax plans would have radically different effects on the distribution of tax burdens in the United States. The Obama tax plan would make the tax system significantly more progressive by providing large tax breaks to those at the bottom of the income scale and raising taxes significantly on upper-income earners. The McCain tax plan would make the tax system more regressive, even compared with a system in which the 2001–06 tax cuts are made permanent. It would do so by providing relatively little tax relief to those at the bottom of the income scale while providing huge tax cuts to households at the very top of the income distribution.