Despite repeated corrections by fact-checking watchdogs, the McCain campaign continued to falsely claim this week that Barack Obama would raise taxes on working families.
Analysis of the two presidential candidates tax proposals by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, as well as various media investigations, have revealed that Barack Obama's tax plan is consistent with his pledge to provide a tax cut for 95 percent of working families.
In fact, the watchdogs have shown, Obama's plan would provide from about three to as much as 29 times more in relief for working families than McCain's tax proposals. By contrast, McCain's tax proposals provide new tax breaks for corporations totaling $300 billion, including a massive $4 billion tax break for oil companies which through price gouging have made record profits in 2008. In addition some 58 percent of income tax cuts would go to the wealthiest one percent of Americans.
In debunking McCain's repeated claims, the Washington Post went so far as to make its own error in claiming that Obama would "lavish too much in tax breaks on the middle class, proposing an expensive $1,000-per-family additional tax credit and, last weekend, piling on top of that an immediate, presumably one-time, $1,000-per-family rebate for energy costs." [emphasis added]
McCain's claim about Obama's record on taxes is based on Obama's vote on a non-binding resolution to recommend the repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest families, according to FactCheck.org. The recommendation did not pass, but would not have included middle-class taxpayers, according to the outline Democrats in Congress proposed. Interestingly, while John McCain claimed to oppose the Bush tax cuts, he refused to use his vote in the Senate to join Obama in voting for the repeal.
McCain's misleading claims may be an attempt to cover his outrageous new tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest CEOs, some of whom may be responsible in no small part for the financial collapse on Wall Street and the ongoing credit crunch. The alternative proposal to the Bush Wall Street bailout that McCain supported called for massive new tax cuts for the very corporations who precipitated the crisis, along with fewer regulations.
But McCain's false attacks are also an attempt to divert attention from the massive tax increase he plans to sneak into the health care system by eliminating tax incentives on employment-based health care benefits, taxing American working families and employers for health benefits for the first time ever to the tune of $3.6 trillion dollars.
Recent studies of McCain's health care tax, a replica of a plan George W. Bush pushed early on, would boot as many as 27 million out of the employment-based insurance system, leaving millions of families at the mercy of private insurance companies in the expensive individual market.
