This is RIPE for a commercial. This obviously hasn't penetrated the average American's consciousness. Please, Please Obama campaign, get this out in a simple way that people will understand.

Agreed. Obama needs to not only quash this lie, but needs to demonstrate his plan's intention to reduce the middle and working class tax break in a thirty to sixty second sound byte.

This needs to happen soon, so that once the October surprise happens, the public at large is not dealing with so many issues that the waters are muddied.

Well, one problem is that polls repeatedly show that some disproportionate number of Americans - usually 18-20% - think they're in the top one percent, economically. So of course, Obama *can* argue that he's going to make things better, financially, for eighty percent of the country -- but *that* argument relies on enough of the populace to accurately interpret their own position.

How about an ad with some basic economic facts so people can get a reality check?

Very badly designed chart, mostly because the labeling is bad. When I first read it, I thought the bars were increase or decrease of taxes, and thought you'd flipped the colors, and even on days as bad as this, my brain usually works pretty well. Is there any way this could be redone so the average medium-information voter could look at it and get what it is actually saying quickly?

Republicans not only THINK you're a fool, they're MAKING you a fool.

That's leadership.

There are two basic problems that Obama has to overcome. The obvious one is that McCain is lying about his plans with taxes. The second one is overcoming the right-wing meme that tax cuts create growth and increase government revenue. The first one he can tackle - the second one is something that will take years to overcome. The Center for American Progress just published an interesting analysis of the differences between supply-side and non-supply-side eras.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/09/supply_side.html

Now how can we boil this down to the point where the average person can get it?

inthewoods, of course we can, but thus far, in his effort to embody post-partisanship, obama hasn't.

that is, it's very easy: bill clinton raised taxes in 1993, the right wing said the economy would tank, and instead we had the best boom of the post-world war ii era.

all that needs to be said.

I've been in the US for 35+yrs (since January '73) and if there's *one* thing I managed to pick up (by osmosis, via immersion) is that "Democrats raise taxes". On whom? For what purpose? Those are details that nobody seems to pay a blind bit of attention to; "small print" and totally immaterial.

My Mother died in '89, my father in '99, at which point I sold their apartment and transferred the funds (my inheritance) here. The issue of taxes on that came up in 2000. Turned out, even though -- to me -- it was a heap of money, it wasn't enough to pay any taxes on. Talking to the accountant, I said I was happy to hear that but, in general, I wasn't averse to paying taxes, as long as they were used for "common good" like schools and healthcare etc. She looked at me as if I landed in her office from Mars "that's the first time, *ever* I heard anyone express that attitude, and I've been a tax adviser for 30 yrs", she said.

Most people don't know how to read bar graphs either.

Tax cuts are Republican policy.

To fight this Obama and all the Dem surrogates need to personalize the figures. As you mentioned several weeks back McCain (or sorry Cindy McCain!) could save up to 350k in taxes under his own plan. This needs to be the crux of an Obama ad--- and it needs to be repeated over, and over and over.

I received not one but two (one forwarded at least five times so far) emails today w/ slightly differing formats warning me (and the other 100 or so new addressees) of Obama's horrendous tax increases. One was identical to that which appears as "false" information found at Snopes.

The kicker is that the person responsible for forwarding it to me is absolutely one who ALWAYS votes against her economic interests because of the so-called "abortion position of the Democratic candidates and Party."

Nothing, and I do mean nothing, will ever change how this person will votes. She seizes on ANY negative information about Democrats, no matter how spurious or deceitful, and uses it as a figurative forwarded cudgel in her relentless war against "the war on aborted souls."

Of course I have been on the receiving end of most of the other lies against Obama, too -- and most come through her as well. As she has expressed it, "anything I can do to stop abortion is fair." She is far from alone.

o
o

With Lehman Bros. declaring bankruptcy tomorrow morning and Merrill Lynch looking for someone to buy them (buy me, please!), the U.S. economic meltdown ain't over yet, folks!

Bush has fucked this economy up so badly and written so many bad checks, it will be a miracle if we aren't all eating fucking tree bark in a year or so. I hope McCain wins and let him try to cut taxes even more - that way lies a Great Depression so severe that it will make the last one look like a tea party....

Hate to shatter any illusions here, but BOTH candidates will have to increase taxes, by a lot. There isn't a 1 in 1000 chance that taxes will not be raised in 2009 and beyond. I've known this for a long, long time but in case you want to argue, check the NYT headlines tonight about the collapse of the investment banks (Lehmen, Merrill, Morgan Stanley, and possible Goldman Sachs). The problem for a decade has been easy and cheap credit - a Ponzi scheme if you will - which has contributed to a large tax haul by the IRS during that period from these banks because of their 'earnings'. Those 'earning's are history now, and the US govt will need to make them up by taxing individuals. So prepare for very significant tax increases for the foreseeable future.

Lack of regulation of credit (thanks to Bush and the moronic Repugs, and Alan Greenspan) has led to this debacle and the sound you will soon hear is the tightening of the tax noose.

The US is heading into a depression, perhaps not like the 1930's but a contraction so severe that you will no longer be thinking about of a return on investment, but rather the return OF your investment. Get out of debt and hunker down.

This is SOP for Repubs. You throw S***! against the wall and some of it sticks. Problem is- What do the Demos do about it. Have we learned? Or do we fail to rebut?

obamataxcut.com

This should be in a commercial that runs from now to November.

Yo, Obama campaign, wake up!

Clean up the graph. Make it a line chart. Ditch the "quintile" terminology and put real annual income ranges on it. Then forward it to the Obama campaign so that Barack can hold it up and explain the truth about the tax plans during a nationally televised debate.
Just make sure it can be understood by the average high school student.

I agree that the chart titles are horrendous - as an engineer I look at information in graphs all the time and while I can make an educated guess as to the real meaning that chart is pretty much worthless.

Get out there, knock on doors in your community, and SHOW them face to face! That's what I've been doing in mine for a couple weeks. I've been out canvassing at least 15 days. I've been leaving the Obama literature on his economic plan in their hands or at their doors, and we've posted similar graphs on the windows of our headquarters so passers-by can see them.

That chart is useless for the same reason that Obama's line about "tax cuts for 90% of taxpayers" is: I can't apply it to my situation. I don't know (nor do I care) what "quintile" I'm in, and I have no way of knowing whether I'm in that 90%.

Just use actual income figures, for craps sake.

Another version of the tax plans, which paints a rather starker image overall, I thought:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v294/FlameRaven/Taxplans.gif

There is this air of unreality about any talk of tax cuts. We are about to tip into some of the worst economic times anyone under the age of 70 has seen, and digging out will require sacrifices I think few can imagine. I doubt there will be any tax cuts of significance for anyone in any quintile.

I only hope the GOP ends up with the lion's share of the blame. Whatever culpability they don't own belongs to those triangulating Dems who went along with the Republicans' misguided deregulation agenda.

I agree with Jabberwocky, the graph ze links to is much better than the graph in the post. A simple visual reading of the graph in the OP shows the red blocks being bigger than the blue blocks in 5 out of 8 cases. Given that the blocks are tax cuts, and red is McCain, that looks like McCain provides better tax cuts to everyone above the median, which is dead wrong. Also, McCain's color gets a rising line, while Obama's gets a falling line.

In Jabberwocky's image, the group getting a huge cut from McCain and a increase from Obama is so small you hardly notice they exist, and the switch from tax cut to tax increase in Obama's chart is a switch of sides, rather than a switch from up to down.

JoeKool is right. Those figures are for business-as-usual. The next few years are definitely not going to be business-as-usual, economically speaking.

And then there's that little nuclear war with Pakistan which both candidates seem to be angling for. No, I don't think you should sell your silver dollars just yet.

This graph would be more impressive if the width of the bars was proportional to the width of the percentile ranges. You would see wide bars where Obama provides more tax relief, and narrow ones where McCain does it. The problem is that McCain's would be extremely narrow and hard to see.