Candidate Tax Plans Offer Little For Micros
Jul 28th, 2008 | By Dawn Rivers Baker | Category: Politics & PolicyWe’re not going to pretend that we don’t have major party nominees for the 2008 presidential election, even if the party conventions that will make those nominees “official” haven’t happened yet. So, we’ll just say that presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama have both put forth tax plans with which to woo voters. If you have to count on stump speeches and campaign white papers to figure out what’s in those plans, it may be tough sledding. Fortunately, the non-partisan Tax Policy Center recently released an analysis of both plans in defense of informed voting.
The Tax Policy Center spent thirty-nine pages in this exercise but the short story for us is that there is precious little in either plan that constitutes targeted small business tax relief. As a general matter, the McCain plan would make the tax code even more regressive than it has become under President Bush, while the Obama plan would tend in the opposite direction. Neither plan does a thing to make the tax code any less complicated. And neither candidate appears to have given much thought to small businesses.
