Comparing tax plans

Editor:

There’s a lot of smoke, mirrors and just plain B.S. nowadays about McCain’s and Obama’s proposed tax plans. Gallup recently announced that 53 percent of Americans believe that Obama will raise taxes on 95 percent of us. I did my best to research the two tax proposals, and here’s what I found:

If you’re in the bottom 95 percent (less than $227,000 income), you’ll pay less taxes under both proposals, but you’ll pay considerably less under Obama’s. If you’re in the top 5 percent, you’ll make out big-time under McCain’s plan, but you’ll have to cough up more under Obama’s--back to the levels of the nineties, in most cases.

Both plans will add to the deficit, but McCain’s will add a lot more, mostly because of maintaining and even increasing Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, but also because he proposes an elimination of capital gains and some huge additional corporate tax breaks. (During the boom years after WWII, corporate taxes were about 6% of government revenue. Today, that’s less than 2 percent.)

Here’s something you can do yourself — or have a friend do for you. (Heck, call me and I’ll do it for you.) Go to a Web site sponsored by www.alchemytoday.com, www.obamataxcut.com, enter your filing status (single, married, etc.), number of dependents, and an estimate of your adjusted gross income. It’ll tell you how you’d do under each tax proposal.

Terry Nelson, Green Valley