I’ll assume from your response that you don’t disagree that Obama’s plan calls for giving a check to some citizens that is greater than the amount they paid in income taxes.

If you don’t see that as income distribution or a welfare payment, so be it.

If I concede that you can honestly believe that a payment to someone who doesn’t even pay income taxes is a tax cut, will you concede that someone can honestly believe (and therefore not be a liar as was asserted) that if they pay more in taxes than they did the year before their taxes were raised, not cut?

Stating your personal beliefs isn’t proving anything to me. I also disagree that it’s a “welfare” payment. That’s just you hung up.

You’ll need to use more than your personal convictions to persuade me that Obama is lying. You haven’t presented any facts to dispute. You’ve only presented your erroneous opinion.

Sounds like we’re just going to have to disagree. You can do any number of denial gymnastics. It still doesn’t make your beliefs correct.

Here’s a set of facts, not assertions:

1. Obama’s tax cuts are based on the premise that the current tax cuts will expire and not be extended.
2. Most taxpayers (meaning people who actually pay income taxes) will pay more the first year under Obama’s plan than they paid the year previous. That’s a tax increase, not a cut.
3. The bottom 50% of taxpayers paid less than three percent of the total income taxes collected in the most recent year for which there is data, 2006.
4. If you give a check to a citizen for an amount that is more than they paid in taxes - a major part of Obama’s plan - it is income redistribution, not a tax cut.

If you take exception to any of the above facts, I will produce supporting evidence.

My opinion: Calling a welfare payment a tax cut is a bigger lie than any McCain has told.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?template=simulation&SimID=266

Those numbers are run for several different scenarios; elderly, married filing jointly (with mortgage, without mortgage), etc. I’d invite you to take a look at table T08-0211 and T08-0210. Here’s the executive summary which you misrepresented (a nice way of saying…) in your comment:

“Obama would give larger tax cuts to low- and moderate-income households and pay some of the cost by raising taxes on high-income taxpayers. In contrast, McCain would cut taxes across the board and give the biggest cuts to the highest-income households.”

You are making some spectacular leaps in logic. Spectacularly wrong. You haven’t proven any of your assertions. Merely asserting something isn’t proof. The link above has downloadable spreadsheets that show the two plans side by side, downloadable in PDF or Excel format. All we have from you are preachings about libertarianism and how everybody is lying.

I’ll grant you that during these election seasons, truth is pushed and pulled by all parties. I assume that you’ll be voting for a write-in or candidate from another party than the majority.

My point in the original post is that McCain has pushed it too far. It’s one thing to say what you hope will be true given your plan. It’s quite another to attempt to remake reality through massive deception, using the media to aid you in said deception.

dross, the truth of the matter is that the only way we’ll get out of debt is if we pay our way out. Obama is saying he’ll cut taxes for most Americans. Based on independent analysis and words he hasn’t changed, he says he’ll stick to it as President. Portraying Obama as a tax and spend liberal is old and inappropriate language.

What part of my statement is incorrect? I’d love to read another non-partisan analysis that paints a different picture. Please share if you are able.

I don’t agree with either party and neither candidate would be my choice - however, unless you are a libertarian absolutist and insist that any deviation from the purist line is the same as any other, I think you’d have to admit that if socialism is the opposite of libertarianism, then Obama is much worse than McCain. McCain is far from good, but when the choice is deadly poison or poison that will just keep us the same amount of sick, I’ll pass on the deadly poison every time.

Exactly.

I challenge anyone following either candidate to read this book. It’s a fast read and will encourage intellectual thinking about our government. Not government-bashing or conspiracy theory stuff, but eye-opening truths about how things ought to be. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0446537519/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books

It seems as though both sides are naively following their party, when in reality, both sides are exactly the same. We’re screwed no matter who wins.

The Tax Policy Center, which you call non-partisan, is a joint venture between the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, which are left-leaning think tanks. I believe the Tax Policy Center is biased, so we get nowhere with that. I wasn’t attempting to address which tax cut is better for the middle class. The assertion I was arguing against in my comment was:

“here’s a direct refutation of the lie that you are telling about Obama wanting to ‘raise your taxes’”,

which appears in the original post. The poster used the Obama campaign web site to back up Obama’s assertion that he is cutting rather than raising taxes, and then goes on to use that as “proof” that McCain is lying. You can dice it any way you want, but under Obama middle class taxes will be higher than they are today. In order to say that isn’t so, he assumes that the tax cuts currently in effect won’t be extended, which they most certainly will. You call McCain a liar for saying that Obama will raise taxes, which his plan will, unless you define tax cuts as raising taxes on middle and upper payers, and giving checks to lower level non-payers.

Even the Tax Policy Center which you cite says in their analysis of the two tax plans in their “An Updated Analysis of the 2008
Presidential Candidates’ Tax Plans” says,
“In several important ways, the candidates’ speeches and web sites differ from the plans as we’ve outlined them above, and, in several cases, descriptions of proposals provided by campaign advisors strike us as implausible.”

That’s a nice way of saying BOTH candidates are lying.

If I pay more total taxes today than I do tomorrow, then my taxes have been raised not cut and to say otherwise is a lie.

He’s raising income taxes on higher incomes, taxes on capital gains and dividends, and hinted at raising payroll taxes on higher incomes. He’s raising myriad taxes on business — windfall profits on oil companies, rearrangement of income earned in other countries, etc. Except last week he admitted that income tax increases are bad for growth and maybe he’ll hold those until the economy recovers.

Bottom line, he’s raising taxes on people who aren’t his constituency and giving the money to people who are. It might work as politics, but doesn’t encourage the growth needed to give people jobs.

Bottom line: Obama gives a bigger tax cut than McCain for the middle class. You can try to obfuscate that fact, but your obfuscation is merely a smoke screen for reality.