Misleading McCain ads

The McCain campaign continues to misrepresent Obama's tax plan. From FactCheck.org:

He (McCain) and others in his campaign have been saying for weeks that Obama once voted for a Democratic budget bill that McCain falsely claimed would raise taxes on persons making as little as $32,000 a year. We challenged that false claim

in an article posted July 8. In this ad, McCain says Obama voted to raise taxes on persons making "just $42,000 a year," which is true for some but not all. Yet the ad still misleads.

A Misleading Picture

The measure Obama supported contained a provision – which is not part of his current tax proposals – that would have increased the rate paid by those who have taxable income high enough to fall into the 25 percent tax bracket. The 25 percent rate would have increased to 28 percent, as it was before the Bush tax cuts. The effect would have been to increase taxes for a single taxpayer with as little as $32,550 in taxable income in 2008, after all deductions and exclusions from total annual earnings.

But that works out to be $41,500 a year in total income for a single taxpayer with no dependents who takes the standard deduction and exemption allowed by the tax code. So it's true that a single taxpayer making $42,000 this year would see an income tax increase – of $15. That assumes the provision Obama voted for had been enacted and assumes further that the taxpayer did not qualify for more than the standard deduction.

But the McCain ad misleads with a strong visual message. The $42,000 claim is true for a lone taxpayer, but it is not true for the woman who is pictured in the ad while the announcer is speaking. She's reading to two small children, apparently her own. If she is supposed to be a single mother of two, then she would be able to make as much as $62,150 in total income in 2008 without being affected by the measure Obama once supported. She would file as a "head of household" with more generous tax brackets and standard deductions than for a single filer, and she would also qualify for exemptions for herself and her two children. (She would also qualify for a $1,000 credit for each child, since they both are obviously under 17, but this would be true whether or not the 25 percent bracket had been increased to 28 percent.)

Furthermore, if viewers are to believe that the woman in McCain's ad is married and files taxes jointly with her husband, the couple could make as much as $90,000 this year without being affected. And anyway, as noted earlier, Obama isn't proposing to implement any such increase in the 25 percent bracket