I'm confused, Obama says he's only gonna raise taxes on peeps makin 250,000...But peeps makin that much have accountants, they know how to "hide" or the "loopholes".....Every time I've heard from politicians "I'm only gonna raise taxes on the rich" I know if ya take the number they say is rich, divide by 3 it's close to the real number...So are we really lookin at 80,000?
Your gut level instinct of dividing by three is pretty sound, actually. Everybody upthread has put out some good info, and it's as accurate as possible, but both candidates have complex bells and whistles in their tax proposals that affect the validity of comparisons (hence a lot of the comparisons use "net effect" rather than hard actual tax rate and bracket info only, which is useful only in a big picture way, not to individuals trying to figure out the personal impact). Obama's proposed one-time 'Stimulus' checks are for instance added in to bring down the "net" tax effect on households in his commercials to come up with that preposterous 95% figure.
Thre are several structural problems which make the figures that have been published by the Obama campaign meaningless, though I'll stop short of saying they are outright lies.
1. As the McCain surrogates have been noting, in their desultory and nonconfrontational sort of way, a lot of the payers in the top two brackets aren't really individuals, but small businesses paying on the individual tables as sole proprietorships, partnerships, and Subchapter S corporations. Taxing the living crap out of them is not a sound recipe for growing the economy. A lot of them could just jump out of the bracket by going corporate, of course the Obamessiah seems to want to tax the crap out of full-fledged corporations too, but there are lots of ways for full-fledged corporation to prevent 'realizing' the income as income, and thus avoid paying taxes on it.
2. The President can propose whatever the Hell he wants to, but Congress actually writes the tax law as they see fit. What comes out has to both (a) produce projected revenue equal to appropriated and authorized expenditures, and (b) get a couple of powerful committees in each house on board and then get a majority in each house to vote for it (PORKporkPORKspecial-interest-tax-breaksPORKporkPORK). That projected income stream has an accuracy half-life of about a month, though it will be about 9 to 15 months before the IRS comes back and tells Congress how wrong they turned out to be and where it's headed, which brings us to...
3. The whole thing is a moving picture and based entirely on inflation, GDP, unemployment, interest rates etc. staying pretty close to where they were when the predictions were made, anything like 9/11, unforeseen economic crisis, large-scale natural disasters, flight from the top-tier tax brackets under the Obama plan, or other major demands or influencers not taken into account in the income models, will blow the projections out of the water and leave Congress rewriting the entire deal from the gound up the very next year (PORKportkPORKetc.)
So, looking at this possibly having significant effects at the 80,000 Adjusted Gross Income level, especially in the out-years, is not that far-fetched, prop-obama to the contrary notwithstanding.
