here is a synopsis of the tax plans as retrieved from the American Tax Policy Institute.
drat, it doesn't work quite right, but here is the WHOLE tax plan, as it's supposed to be! anyone who knows how to post a .doc, please let me know or i'll send it to you and you can post it. i printed it off for family yesterday. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/UploadedPDF/411693_CandidateTaxPlans.pdf
Here's how the average tax bill could change in 2009 if either John McCain's or Barack Obama's tax proposals were fully in place.
MCCAIN
OBAMA
Income
Avg. tax bill
Over $2.9M
-$269,364
+$701,885
$603K and up
-$45,361
+$115,974
$227K-$603K
-$7,871
+$12
$161K-$227K
-$4,380
-$2,789
$112K-$161K
-$2,614
-$2,204
$66K-$112K
-$1,009
-$1,290
$38K-$66K
-$319
-$1,042
$19K-$38K
-$113
-$892
Under $19K
-$19
-$567
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/url.cfm?ID=411693
John McCain and Barack Obama have starkly different philosophies about tax policy - how to raise the revenue needed to support government programs, spur growth and ensure economic fairness.
But voters really want to know one thing: How would the presidential candidates' views trickle down to their tax bills? A report released Wednesday by a nonpartisan policy group in Washington, D.C., takes a big first step toward answering that question.
According to the Tax Policy Center's findings, the common assumptions most people make about the plans of McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Obama, the Democrats' pick, are not wildly off-base.
McCain: The average taxpayer in every income group would see a lower tax bill, but high-income taxpayers would benefit more than everyone else.
Obama: High-income taxpayers would pay more in taxes, while everyone else's tax bill would be reduced. Those who benefit the most - in terms of reducing their taxes as a percentage of after-tax income - are in the lowest income groups.
Please help us spread the word about this letter to your friends, union leaders, union brothers and sisters, other co-workers, and family members:
FORMER CLINTON ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS ENDORSE BARACK OBAMA
“Barack Obama is the best choice to restore the American Dream for working families.”
February 21, 2008
Dear Friends:
We were privileged to work for President Bill Clinton in senior appointed positions in the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board, and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the 1990s. We have great respect for President Clinton and Senator Clinton.
In 2008, however, we believe that Barack Obama is the best choice to restore the American Dream for working families. We support Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. We urge you to join us in voting or caucusing for Barack Obama.
Hope has been a rare commodity for America’s working families in recent years. The American Dream seems less and less achievable as more and more families face the threat of slipping out of the middle class. Job growth has been anemic throughout George W. Bush’s seven years in office, and it has ground to a halt in recent months. Real wages have stagnated. Forty-seven million people have no health insurance. Reliable, adequate pensions are increasingly rare. The stress of meeting the demands of work and family has grown for many adults who face the challenge of caring for their children and their parents at the same time.
Rather than shoring up the middle class’ crumbling foundations, the Bush Administration has weakened them further. Unions --- critical contributors to a strong and growing middle class --- have faced an unprecedented attack from the White House, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Labor Department. The Bush Administration has presided over irresponsible trade deals and massive tax giveaways that accelerate the export of American jobs. The Bush Labor Department launched an assault on overtime pay and continues to search for ways to weaken the Family and Medical Leave Act. Protections against workplace discrimination have been undermined by shrinking enforcement resources at the EEOC and the Labor Department, as well as anti-worker decisions by Bush’s appointees to the Supreme Court, lower federal courts, and the EEOC. Safety and health protections in workplaces and mines across the country are an afterthought.
In the face of difficult economic times and a hostile federal government, working families have been struggling to secure their place in the middle class and sustain their hope in the face of despair. Barack Obama has a plan to secure and expand the middle class and, perhaps more important, give working families reason to hope again. He plans to:
We urge you to go to www.BarackObama.com, click on the “Issues” tab, and then click on “Economy” and “Family” to learn more about Barack Obama’s specific plans to strengthen and expand the middle class.
Barack Obama understands the hopes and dreams of working families fighting to secure a better future for themselves and their children. Barack Obama was raised in modest circumstances by a single mother and his grandparents. As he has said many times, all he had growing up was love, hope, and education. He knows what it means to be denied health insurance: his own mother worried about whether her new health insurance policy would deny her coverage as she lay dying from cancer. We are firmly convinced that Barack Obama wants every child in the United States to have the same opportunity to succeed he had. We are equally convinced that Barack Obama’s example will give every child in America reason to hope that they can achieve their dreams.
Barack Obama understands that change will not be easy. He recognizes that we will not be able to improve the lot of working families unless we change our politics in Washington. Lobbyists will not set the agenda and buy up every chair at the table. For the first time in a long time, working families will have a voice in our nation’s policies. As a community organizer, a civil rights attorney, a state legislator, and a U.S. Senator, he has constantly reached beyond what divides us to forge a working majority for hope. He believes our nation’s best days lay ahead of us --- not behind us. He helps us believe in the American Dream. Barack Obama has the experience we must have in the next President of the United States of America.
We hope you will join us in supporting Barack Obama for President of the United States. Thank you very much.
Joseph Dear, Former Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health,U.S. Department of Labor
John Donahue, Former Counselor to the U.S. Secretary of Labor, and Former Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy, U.S. Department of Labor
Fred Feinstein, Former General Counsel, National Labor Relations Board
Sarah Fox, Former Member, National Labor Relations Board
William Gould, Former Chairman, National Labor Relations Board
Seth Harris, Former Counselor to the U.S. Secretary of Labor, and Former Acting Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy, U.S. Department of Labor
Harry Holzer, Former Chief Economist, U.S. Department of Labor
Paul Igasaki, Former Vice-Chair and Commissioner, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Charles Jeffress, Former Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, U.S. Department of Labor
Paul Steven Miller, Former Commissioner, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and Former White House Liaison to the Disability Community
Edward Montgomery, Former Deputy Secretary of Labor, U.S. Department of Labor
Betsy Myers, Former Deputy Assistant to the President, and Former Director of Women’s Initiatives and Outreach, The White House
Shirley J. Wilcher, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Federal Contract Compliance (OFCCP), Employment Standards Administration, U.S. Department of Labor
Posted December 19, 2007 | 03:43 PM (EST)
From the very beginning -- back when our torture chambers still had that new torture chamber smell; and before our chief executive's incompetence exploded like an M80 inside the clenched-fist of the world -- George W. Bush has been an embarrassment.
We know his disgraceful deeds and policies. But it's his utter lack of quality; his unsubstantial presence; his marble-mouthed oratorical retardation; his inability to inspire greatness; and his empty-suit absence of intellectual curiosity which preordained him to be the worst President of the United States in modern history.
Admittedly, when it comes to the presidency, my personal level of idealism rests somewhere between Frank Capra and Aaron Sorkin. I'm a presidential geek. One of my life goals is to work in the White House for one week. My Dad's old office at the Treasury Department used to look out over the east lawn, and when I was a kid I used to imagine that one day the president would invite me and my Dad for a ride on Marine One.
But after seven years in this Dark Age, I've almost forgotten what it was like to have a real president occupying the White House: a president who, even if I disagreed with his policies and ideology, dignified the office with a stature that symbolized the awesomeness of America.
Emerson wrote, "Every hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus, even, 'I pray you, let me never hear that man's name again.'"
We seem to experience this routine with almost every two-term president. But President Bush was never a hero in the first place and only grew more ridiculous with each subsequent crime against the Constitution, against human decency and against democracy itself. If there's any justice left in this nation, history will record that President Bush was an entirely inadequate tool; a bungling villain whose early popularity grew out of a traumatic and patriotic need to support the office regardless of who occupied it.
And when the flood waters literally rose up and washed away the disguise, the slack-jawed poseur was revealed -- the "bore" who had always been there, but who had been previously and cynically costumed in cowboy drag. Some of us recognized the charade from the beginning, but it required a second national tragedy, this time in New Orleans, to alert the media and the rest of America to his criminal incompetence.
American history is inextricably tied to the presidency. It's how we mentally assemble the chronology of our past. For going on eight years, we've endured a chief executive who never should have ascended to this post. Consequently, this decade has been an aberration; a time when Americans somehow championed an illegitimate, Orwellian hooplehead and, naturally, we suffered for our lack of vision. This is how most of the first decade of this century will be remembered.
Yet our generation is being offered another chance here -- an opportunity to set things straight and elect a president who not only illustrates the historical qualities of the office, but who also defines an energetic new approach.
The next president has to be Senator Barack Obama.
Senator Obama's intelligence, passion and quality of character can inspire us to recapture our own potential for greatness. And after all these years of darkness, there is no alternative other than to correct our trajectory with someone who can elevate our common goals -- the American Dream. For the American Dream to survive, this era demands a new president who will include all of us in the debate over our future, whether or not we agree on every issue.
And I'm proud to say that I don't agree with the senator on everything. But it doesn't matter because this campaign is about much more than individuals and their pet issues. This is about the reacquisition of an ideal -- of a benevolent greatness which has been stolen away from us.
I see in Senator Obama an historic character who fits within my persnickety and idealistic template for the presidency -- and this time around, it happens that my idealistic choice has a realistic chance to win. So this isn't necessarily an endorsement based on ideology, but an endorsement based on that which is required from an historical perspective.
The alternatives on either side of this campaign are ultimately redundant to what we have now.
On the Republican side, each frontrunner represents a rage-inducing aspect of the present Bush regime. The Romney Unit represents the Paris Hilton fiscal policy of the Bush administration; Giuliani is the unstable, crazy-ass hubristic gunslinger; and Mike Huckabee is the cross-bearing fundamentalist who floats in the same fantasy world as Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort.
On the Democratic side, John Edwards is a tough call because he has the right idea. But there was a thing with Edwards from 2004 that I can't seem to shake. And I've really, really tried. During one of the primary debates, Howard Dean stood up to answer a question. As was the campaign fashion at the time, Dean rolled up his sleeves. Then, behind him, I spotted John Edwards whose eyes suddenly widened at Dean's sleeve-rolling as if to say, Oh crap, I should roll up my sleeves now or else I won't be awesome like Howard. Then he quickly rolled up his sleeves. It was an awkwardly candid moment which revealed a lack of originality and, for my admittedly nitpicky tastes, a little too much of the staged illusion of it all. But most importantly, I imagined him exhibiting the same derivative behavior when voting with the president on Iraq.
Senator Clinton, meanwhile, is certainly more intelligent and centrist than President Bush, but there's a secretive, calculating DLC side to the senator which drifts too dangerously close to the universe of Dick Cheney than the fresh approach her husband, President Clinton, offered in 1992.
Speaking of which, President Clinton said this week that Senator Clinton would dispatch the first President Bush on a world tour in order to repair America's reputation abroad. First, 'the hell you say?! Second, wouldn't that be just like a Cheney -- to use a Bush as a political tool. Seriously, we can't have this. Not even as a speculative talking point. Not any more.
This is what we're desperately trying to escape, goddamn it. This is why it's imperative that Senator Obama win the nomination and ultimately the White House itself.
Naturally, the day might arrive when President Obama becomes Emerson's bore. One day, years from now, we'll likely be lamenting the traditional media's "Obama Fatigue" narrative. But, by that time, I think we'll be prepared for the next era in American history. Hopefully, after two terms and eight years, President Obama will hand over his legacy to his vice president. But for now he's the historical antidote to the darkness and division we've endured for too many years. He's our best hope to restore the national equilibrium and to fulfill both the expectation of greatness the presidency deserves and, thusly, the greatness of America.
And no. However awesome it'd be, I'm not saying these things in exchange for a flight aboard Marine One. I mean, I wouldn't turn it down, of course... but that's not why.
From Robert Reich's Blog:
I’m becoming increasingly concerned about the stridency and inaccuracy of charges in Iowa -- especially coming from my old friend. While I’m as hard-boiled as they come about what’s said in campaigns, I just don’t think Dems should stoop to this. First, HRC attacked O's plan for keep Social Security solvent. Social Security doesn’t need a whole lot to keep it going – it’s in far better shape than Medicare – but everyone who’s looked at it agrees it will need bolstering (I was a trustee of the Social Security Trust Fund ten years ago, and I can vouch for this). Obama wants to do it by lifting the cap on the percent of income subject to Social Security payroll taxes, which strikes me as sensible. That cap is now close to $98,000 (it’s indexed), and the result is highly regressive. (Bill Gates satisfies his yearly Social Security obligations a few minutes past midnight on January 1 every year.) The cap doesn’t have to be lifted all that much to keep Social Security solvent – maybe to $115,00. That’s a progressive solution to the problem. HRC wants to refer Social Security to a commission. That's avoiding the issue, and it's irresponsible: A commission will likely call either for raising the retirement age (that’s what Greenspan’s Social Security commission came up with in the 1980s) or increasing the payroll tax on all Americans. So when HRC charges that Obama’s plan would “raise taxes” and her plan wouldn’t, she’s simply not telling the truth . . . ."
Read the rest at: http://robertreich.blogspot.com/
As a Union Representative from Iowa my work often takes me to Illinois. So I am proud to have known about Barack and been one of his first supporters from Iowa to sign Dick Durbin's petition to draft Barack to run. After that I was with my family among the thousands to gather in Springfield as he officially announced his candidacy. From there I have served on committees and have been an Iowa Precinct Captian as well and I never had a single doubt ..... until today. You see, today I heard for the first time in person, Michelle Obama speak. And as much as I think of Barack I was left wondering if perhaps I was not supporting the wrong Obama. What an incredible woman that delivered what I can honestly say was the single best stump speech I have EVER heard. Michelle later assured me that I had better stick to my original candidate because he was the only Obama I would get an opportunity to vote for any time soon. And Caucusing for Barack AND Michelle really will be an opportunity that I am looking forward to. What a magnificant first lady we'll have.
Portland, Maine
Isaiah Oliver, a 24-year-old white social worker, grew up in this overwhelmingly white city and attended the predominantly white University of Richmond in Virginia. Ask him why he supports Barack Obama and he says it's because of the candidate's race.
"Because he's black it makes me want to believe that he will change things," says Mr. Oliver, leaving an Obama campaign rally here. "It feels like you are part of something that's starting to change American politics. It's the cool factor. He's a rock star."
As he campaigns across the country, Sen. Obama, the son of a black father and a white mother, is both revealing and tapping into a changed racial landscape, especially among younger whites. After decades of often bitter polarization and racial tension on issues ranging from the spread of civil rights to affirmative action, many whites say they are drawn to Sen. Obama precisely because they think his mixed-race background reflects America's increasingly diverse population and projects a more optimistic vision of the country's racial future.
Sen. Obama's candidacy, whether it succeeds or not, appears to mark a turning point in race and politics in America: It is prompting significant numbers of white Americans to consider voting for him not despite his racial background, but because of it.
"Obama is running an emancipating campaign," says Bob Tuke, who is white and is the former chairman of the Tennessee Democratic party. "He is emancipating white voters to vote for a black candidate."
To read on: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119466546698288951.html?mod=home_we_banner_left
Yesterday afternoon I was proud as a county chair to serve as host to Senator Barack Obama at a campaign stop in my home town. With only about 5,000 souls in Chariton it is an incredible sight to see almost 300 people turn out in the middle of the afternoon to see a candidate. That alone made me feel very proud of my community but I would soon have other reasons to feel proud. After listening to Barack speak I was inundated by folks who renounced their affiliations with other candidates (And even other parties!!!) and are now firmly committed to electing Senator Barack Obama as our next president. Finally they got to see what I have been telling them along about this guy; that he is genuine and you will feel that when you look into his eyes. But perhaps most significant was that after the rally there was a stronger sense of community among these neighbors for having been drawn into a political landscape by this man where we are all worthy of respect and political differences are respected values. I genuinely wish that every community in this nation was able to experience what ours did yesterday, not because it would guarantee the election of Barack Obama (which it most certainly would!) but also because of what it would do for us as a nation to come together again and understand that there is far more within us all that binds us together than there are political nuances that seperate us. And I sincerely and genuinely believe that under an Obama presidency we really will all get that opportunity, not to have him in every town and city neccessarily, but to become a nation again where neighbors are neighbors regardless of their beliefs and all of us can share in a mutual sense of community as Americans.
![[Barack Obama]](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/HC-GJ670_Obama_20070404185338.gif)
