Monday, September 8, 2008

Mccain's Convenient Untruth

That's the title of Sebastian Mallaby's excellent column today. The whole thing is worth reading. Here's the most important part:

Obama is not proposing to raise taxes for most Americans. To the contrary, he would triple the earned-income tax credit for low-wage earners, increasing work incentives at the bottom. He would cut taxes on people in the middle -- indeed, he would do so more aggressively than McCain would. It is only the wealthiest Americans who would face higher tax bills under Obama. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Obama's plan would require the richest 1 percent of Americans to sacrifice a modest 1.5 percent of their after-tax income in 2012.

2 comments:

Confusion? said...

The real question is, and “Swift Boat” comes to mind, why isn’t Obama fighting back against the blatant lies in McCain’s recent ads? He can take the high road and not dignify this non-sense with a rebuttal but we all know what happened to Kerry when he tried this tactic. A simple and effective response would be to place the 2 charts of each tax plan on the screen and just leave it there for the duration of the ad. Just ask the citizens to find their income on the chart and decide which plan benefits them. At the very least, the stark contrast between the proposals for those making 2.7 million dollars and up will raise some eyebrows…I doubt most people have even seen the proposals yet.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure that it would be an effective TV ad to show the charts. But I agree that they need to flood the waves with something that effectively tells the truth (e.g. citing the various "factchecks").

Maybe a large scale internet ad buy that does this through banner ads that leads to a tax calculator using Tax Policy center's tables --like we link to. On the other hand McCain would probably respond with its own ads that just make up numbers --at some level if the media does not think the truth matters, then there is only so far you can go.

Bottom line though, I agree with you --they've go to try to shame the McCain campaign.