This chart does an excellent job of showing how Obama will cut taxes for the vast majority of folks. I know some of us who are phonebanking or canvassing feel like we are running up against a brick wall in convincing folks that Obama will be cutting for a far greater share of the population than John McCain will. Viveka Weiley at Chartjunk does a fantastic job of weighting the chart so that we can very visually understand how Obama's plan targets the vast majority of Americans.
See below the fold for the graph:
(Used under the Creative Commons License)
Under the Creative Commons License, you are free to share, copy, and distribute this chart, so I suggest forwarding it to your network via email, photocopying and bringing with you when canvassing, however you see fit (just credit the author, and give a shout-out to the Creative Commons License).
Chartbucket bases the chart upon this fairly well-known one by the WaPo - the data comes from the analysis of the independent, non-partisan Tax Policy Center (PDF document)
As James Carville said recently, it's a simple choice:
If you think what America needs is a tax cut for people making over half-a-million dollars a year then vote for McCain. If you think middle-class people are struggling – that their incomes are going down and they need help – vote for Obama. It’s a very simple choice.
And remember:
- Obama will only raise taxes on the top 1 %, i.e., those making $600,000 or more. He will cut taxes for 95% of Americans: anyone making less than $250,000 will get a tax cut.
- He will not raise any taxes on anyone making less than 250K, not payroll, not income, not capital gains.
- According to the Tax Policy Center, the Obama plan provides three times as much tax relief for middle class families as the McCain plan.
- Families making more than $250,000 will pay either the same or lower tax rates than they paid in the 1990s. No family will pay higher tax rates than they would have paid in the 1990s.
As Ezra Klein says in his analysis of this chart:
The press tends to report tax cuts in terms of aggregate impact on the federal treasury rather than the median impact on taxpayers. But individual taxpayers don't experience tax cuts in terms of the treasury. They experience it in terms of their tax bill. And because Obama weights his tax cut towards the middle class, which is rather a lot larger than the top one percent, he actually provides a much bigger tax cut to many more people than McCain, who managed to center his tax cut on the wealthy such that it costs more but helps fewer taxpayers.
Here's the chart that the Tax Policy Center gives in their analysis: