Can someone put some dollars with the quintiles, please?

This is great, Kevin! Bush has proven the conservative mantra, that what is good for the exceedingly rich is best for America! Bush's policies have made the US an unstoppable powerhouse, unlike under Clinton...

Both plans add significantly to the national debt, but Howard Gleckman comments over at TPC's blog section:

McCain, who once opposed President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cut as a give-away to the rich, but now embraces them, has designed a plan more consistent with the New McCain than the old. It is as Republican a plan as Obama’s is Democratic. The top 20% of taxpayers get a 3% reduction in after-tax income in 2009, while the lowest-earning 60% would get less than 1%.

I know. You're shocked.

This proves Obama is a moderate.

greennotGreen,
According to the study, the "cash income" of the quintiles are as follows
lowest - to $18.981
second - to 37,595
middle - to 66.354
forth - to 111,645
top - over 160,972

Clearly, this is good news for Rudy Giuliani.

greennotGreen:

I suspect you (or the article you quoted) meant:
Bottom: $ 0 - $18981
Second: $18981 - $37595
Third: $37595 - $66354
Fourth: $66354 -$111645
Top: Over $111645

and perhaps:
Top 5%: Over $160972

catclub,
I stand corrected.

Thanks, OW and catclub.

OW and greennotGreen:

I scanned the paper and now I no longer know what
those quintiles represent.
Apparently they are 'tax units', but somehow re-jiggered to represent equal numbers of people.
Huh??

It is the complication of joint and separate tax filing, plus allocation of dependents....

It might or might not be family income.

This is why the best experiments are done ONCE.
Do it twice and you have to decide which one you like. I was much smarter when I just corrected
somebody's typo.

McCain, who once opposed President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cut as a give-away to the rich, but now embraces them

But no...McCain is no flip-flopper. This stuff REALLY pisses me off. The GOP successfully labeled Kerry a "flip-flopper" for being a sentient person, learning that he had been misled and lied to about the war and changing his position. McCain paraded around as a mavericky moderate opposing some Bush policy until he decides to reverse course and stroke the GOP base to try and get elected.

I'm not sure which is more despicable, McCain himself or the fact that the Dem Party cannot seem to make hay out of crap like this.

The GOP successfully labeled Kerry a "flip-flopper" for being a sentient person, learning that he had been misled and lied to about the war and changing his position. McCain paraded around as a mavericky moderate opposing some Bush policy until he decides to reverse course and stroke the GOP base to try and get elected.

Darn liberal media!

McCain is going to have everybody pay lower taxes, become better off whatever the economy does, give the Pentagon almost every toy they want, continue paying for a war ad infinitum, reduce the deficit and pay down the national debt.

It's magic.

I'm voting McCain! My friend!

Can someone put some dollars with the quintiles, please?

Posted by: greennotGreen on June 12, 2008 at 2:07 PM | PERMALINK

Amen. Every time I try to discuss charts like this with people who make less than $50,000 a year, they always assume they're above the middle quintile.

Dollar figures, please!

It's magic.

Well, he is older than most Wizards.

assume they're above the middle quintile

The use of quintiles when measuring incomes is interesting, since it obscures what the median income is.

There is no reason to reduce the tax burden of the Fourth Quintile.

To give a full breakdown of the percentiles above, as taken from the study itself:

20% - $18,981
40% - $37,595
60% - $66,354
80% - $111,645
90% - $160,972
95% - $226,918
99% - $603,402
99.9% - $2,871,682

The pdf itself has all sorts of good charts/graphs in it. Good stuff.

God Bush America!

We need a government for the rich and nothing but the rich so help us god.

Switch to the "McCain Smile," Man I love that, few things these days make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck the way JM's smile does.

The 2012 projections are a bit fairer to McCain perhaps although it's still skewed ridiculously to the right.

And do I have this correct: Even under Obama's plan, the highest tax bracket is still under 40%. When Regan took office the highest was 70%.

And one more thing: it's very important to note here the sharp contrasts even within the top 1/5. The top 1% are running away with money they dont even have to work for thanks to the insanely low capital gains tax.

Conservative Bush Republicans don't flip-flop. They're entirely consistent in saying whatever suits them whenever it suits them. They've never been honest, so consistency by our standards doesn't apply to them.

What's a Conservative stand for?
What day of the week is this?

"When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income."
--Plato

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I saw somewhere (CNN?) that Obama's plan would increase taxes on the 2.9mil+ group by something like 700,000$ on average. That seems, well, sort of insane. I'm generally a fan of a progressive tax system, but that number sounds just sort of crazy and outrageous, as a political proposal. McCain's plan is stupid (basically just an across the board tax cut, which of course is going to disproportionately affect the people that earn most of the income), but it doesn't have that kind of of shockingly crazy number associated with it.

Bad, the percentage change in after tax income on the top .1% is -11.5%. Since the average dollar amount is $700,000, one can conclude that the average income of the top .1% is $6,300,000. The 2.9 mil is, of course, the minimum income needed to be in the top .1%.

What this indicates, since Obame is, for the most part, putting the tax rates back to where they were under Clinton, is that Bush's tax cuts went overwhelmingly to the rich.

Damn! +3% is better than -2% so I will have to vote for McCain. Not!!! Paying for 100 years of occupation in Iraq will kick the hell out of McCain's budget numbers.

Let's see those bar charts with the bar width proportional to population quantile size:

McCain
Obama

Based on how rich you think you are, and assuming you want to pay the least tax, who should you vote for?

So, Kevin, did you edit the graph yourself or did someone do that for you?

I notice that you took out the part that shows annual after tax income under the Obama plan being actually less across the board than that under the McCain plan.

Any reason for that?

The after-tax income of Obama's plan is not "less across the board" when compared to McCain's plan. It is less when all of the categories are added together. The large incomes in the top percentiles skew that statistic. The total after-tax income change is irrelevant when compared to the quintile by quintile comparison.

"Across the board" implies that in every category McCain's plan provides more after-tax income than Obama's. But that isn't the case. Obama's plan clearly provides more after-tax income than McCain's plan in every category below the top quintile.