Obama's Tax Cut Calculator: The Art of Omission
This blog entry is part of a Fall 2008 blogging exchange between American University in Cairo and Stanford University's Online Activism class. To read all the entries, follow this thread; be sure read the earliest entries first.
So here’s our blog post analyzing Barack Obama's campaign website for our Rhetoric of Online Activism class, written by a group of three students with three different political viewpoints: Libertarian Estevan Flores, moderate Andrew Marantan and liberal (but fiscally conservative) Danny Zuckerman. Despite this variation, because we are all fiscally conservative, we were interested in analyzing how Obama presented his fiscal policy; we found Obama’s “Tax Cut Calculator” feature of his website is designed to serve a political purpose by presenting results differently depending on which candidate the cuts favor.
The feature gives visitors a quote of the tax cut they will receive from each candidate by inputting information about income, marital status, number of dependents, age and other financial-related information. Given the candidates’ policies, we were interested in how the calculator might present information that would be favorable to McCain. Up to the $200,000 income bracket, the tool presented the predicted tax cuts from each candidate side-by-side, with the Obama policy’s cut always higher or equal. However, upwards of $200,000 dollars, the economic group that McCain’s cuts are known to benefit more, rather than showing the values, it says: “You will probably not get a tax cut under the Obama-Biden plan.”
We found this interesting, because rather than showing information that might appear favorable to McCain, the Obama site omits the fact that individuals in this income bracket might benefit more from McCain’s policies. Politically, there is no benefit for the Obama campaign to admit that McCain’s tax cuts will be greater for a segment of the population; instead, they state that some people probably won’t get a tax break under the Obama-Biden plan. This is indicative of the socio-economic status of Obama supporters and his target audience – this group tends to be lower and middle class citizens, and his policies and website features are geared to appeal to them.
Comments
This post was extremely well written and thorough. All of the points were excellent and convincing.
Posted by: Kevin | December 2, 2008 04:49 PM
This post was extremely well written and thorough. All of the points were excellent and convincing.
Posted by: Kevin | December 2, 2008 04:52 PM
Well I find it particularly interesting now that Obama has been elected and has been hinting that the tax cuts for the 250K+ tax bracket may not be repealed any more and may actually just be let to expire as they were set to do by the Bush tax cuts.
What I'm getting at is, Obama seemed to be omitting info during his campaign that could have potentially helped him. I guess people will find out for sure when they file their tax returns! http://www.taxadvisr.com
Posted by: Julie | December 14, 2008 02:50 AM