McCain Would Raise Your Taxes July 22, 2008March 11, 2017 Well, no, he probably wouldn’t – but at least we honestly admit that. Why must McCain take such a different tack? This is not straight talk, my friends, this is deception and fear-mongering. When he talks about ‘Czechoslovakia’ as if it were still a country, or repeatedly confuses whether Iran is predominantly Shiia or Sunni, he’s not trying to deceive. But on taxes? He knows better, my friends. He is doing just what Bush did: planning to massively favor the rich while trying to make himself out to be the champion of the average guy. Two examples: 1. From factcheck.org: McCain’s Small-Business Bunk He claims 23 million small-business owners would pay higher tax rates under Obama. He’s wrong. The vast majority would see no change, and many would get a cut. . . . 2. The beginning of a letter he just sent me: Dear Friend, I’ve taken the liberty of enclosing a McCain 2008 bumper sticker for you. I’m hoping I can count on you to display your sticker right away as part of our effort to build momentum and excitement across America. Every campaign argues that the differences are great and the stakes high. This time, they are. This election will present Americans with a clear choice between my vision for our country and that of my Democratic opponent, Barack Obama. Senator Obama talks about change. But his idea of change is to raise your taxes . . . The underlining was his, not mine. And because the letter, asking for as little as $25, was a mass mailing, my friends, the straight talk would have been to say, ‘His idea of change is to give average folks a tax cut – but to pay for it not by digging deeper into debt, but, rather, by restoring the tax rates on income above $250,000 to roughly their Clinton/Gore levels.’ The letter goes on to say, ‘Senator Obama, despite being a freshman Senator, has championed a long list of pork-barrel projects for his state – 53 special earmarks totaling $97.4 million.’ Wow. That’s a lot of money. If we assume that every one of those projects was completely worthless (e.g., why does the Red Cross need money for emergency preparedness?), it works out to $9.7 billion a year if ‘everybody did it’ (100 Senators times $97 million). So if McCain killed 100% of such spending, we’d reduce our $3 trillion in Federal spending by three-tenths of one percent! You go, Senator McCain! Way to give it to us straight! Of course, most would agree that some portion of that $97.4 million in spending was worthy. Maybe even all of it. (Here were his 2007 requests – do any of them seem like a Republican Senator’s $398 million ‘bridge to nowhere’ to you?) And others would note that Senator Obama voted for a moratorium on all earmarks. It failed by a wide margin, so Obama chose not to disadvantage the people of his state by ‘unilaterally disarming,’ as it were. But let’s not get into all that. The main point, my friends, is that Senator McCain is trying to deceive average Americans into thinking Obama will raise their taxes . . . and into thinking that cutting Federal spending by three-tenths of one-percent is bold and visionary. AND THAT’S JUST WHAT THEY’RE DOING OFFICIALLY 3. Another posting on Factcheck.org . . . A new e-mail being circulated about Obama’s tax proposals is almost entirely false. Alert readers may already have noted that this chain e-mail does not provide links to any of Obama’s actual proposals or cite any sources for the claims it makes. That is because they are made up. This widely distributed message is so full of misinformation that we find it impossible to believe that it is the result of simple ignorance or carelessness on the part of the writer. Almost nothing it says about Obama’s tax proposals is true. We conclude that this deception is deliberate. . . . ☞ We can do better than this. And, I think, come November 4, we will.