The Brookings Institute, that published this analysis of both McCain's and Obama's tax plans, is a left of center group (Democrat) per Wikopedia. So, they'd be expected to slant things to lead readers to believe that the most liberal Senator Obama is more desirable then McCain. Brookings Institution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This analysis on the 5th paragraph down, also mentions that they didn't take into account Obama's plan to raise Social Security payroll taxes, which decreases the amount of take home pay the middle class worker will have. McCain, especially, says he’ll offset many of his tax cuts with spending reductions. And, in fairness, the TPC analysis looks only at taxes, not spending or health care. It also excludes two extremely controversial tax proposals—Obama’s plan to raise Social Security payroll taxes and McCain’s promise to give people the option to file a vastly simplified return. TPC could not model either because the campaigns did not provide enough details. In the above paragraph 5, they say they look only at taxes. However, they must mean Federal Income Taxes instead of all taxes such as the Social Security payroll Tax. ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________ These are some of the comments by the readers at the bottom of the article from Brookings Institute and the Tax Policy Center (TPC) about McCain's and Obama's tax plans: Re: TPC Looks at the Obama and McCain Tax Plans by Anonymous on Wed 11 Jun 2008 06:35 PM EDT | Permanent Link There is obviously as much data available to model Obama's payroll tax increase as there is to model his other tax increases. I think you excluded this since it would skew the numbers much more in McCain's favor. Re: Re: Re: Re: TPC Looks at the Obama and McCain Tax Plans by Anonymous on Thu 12 Jun 2008 03:11 PM EDT | Permanent Link it should also be noted that obama has said all sorts of different things about what his payroll tax increase might be so it's difficult to say what he exactly he plans to do other than bob and weave. and while we're noting, maybe we should note that pretending obama is going to shrink the deficit while proposing nearly a trillion dollars in new spending is laughable.