The thing about a donut hole is that it is empty. There is nothing. And that, it seems, is what is left of Barack Obama's plan to fix Social Security. The Obama people now tell us that his proposal, which is built on a tax hike for those earning more than $250,000, won't take effect until at least 2018. You heard right: 2018.    more »

Barack Obama has a plan to fix Social Security. Or does he? Obama does have a vague proposal to raise payroll taxes for workers making more than $250,000. But there is a lot less to it than meets the eye, and Obama has left some hugely important questions unanswered.    more »

We've heard from the Obama campaign about our blog post on Senator Obama's Social Security tax increase on people earning more than $250,000. The campaign clarified that the threshold would be $250,000, but Senator Obama has not specified what the rate would be, when it would take effect, whether it would apply to employers, employees, or both, or what the tax base would be.   more »

In preparing our analysis of the candidates’ tax plans, we sent descriptions to each campaign for comment/clarification/correction. Senator Obama’s staff asked us not to include his reported support for a Social Security tax on earnings above $200,000 or $250,000, saying that there was no specific proposal. So we left the Social Security proposal out of our core analysis. We also left out Senator McCain’s proposal for an optional alternative tax system on similar grounds. We did discuss these non-proposals in two sidebars in our analysis.   more »