In a desperate effort to extend their thirty-year experiment in income redistribution from working folks to idle rich, the neo-conmen and their point man McCain.... In a desperate effort to extend their thirty-year experiment in income redistribution from working folks to idle rich, the neo-conmen and their point man McCain have been trying to belabor Obama's tax plan by claiming it is targeting small businesses.

Coming from the champions of Wal-Mart and other megacorporations that have been systematically decimating Main Street for decades, this is disingenuous.

Last night my son Jack emailed me links to an article that simply lays out some of the realities of the situation. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes:

Despite clear data to the contrary, it is often claimed that changes to the top two income tax rates affect large numbers of small-business owners. In particular, some have argued that extending all of the 2001 tax cuts--including the reductions in the top rate (from 39.6 percent to 35 percent) and the next-to-top rate (from 36 percent to 33 percent)--beyond 2010 is vital for small businesses because many small-business owners are in the top two tax brackets. This claim is false.

Estimates by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center show that just 1.9 percent of filers with any small-business income (roughly 650,000 filers) will be subject to either of the top two income tax rates in 2009. In other words, 98.1 percent of small-business filers have income too low to be subject to either of the top two tax rates.

Moreover, many of the roughly 650,000 filers with small-business income who face one of the top two tax rates are merely passive investors who have nothing to do with running the business. This is because the Tax Policy Center data cited above use the Treasury Department’s relatively broad definition of "small business." Under the Treasury definition, for example, the $84 of income President Bush received in 2001 from a passive investment in an oil and gas company made him a "small-business owner."

Further, quoth my son:

Salary.com did a survey in 2006 of [small] business owners' and CEOs' salaries. The survey shows that the average income is around $233,000. Note that this salary is in fact under the threshold that Obama would raise taxes on, so Obama will not raise taxes on the average small business owner. Also, this survey defined "small" as having 500 employees or less which is fairly liberal and certainly not what most Americans think of as a small business.

I believe this is incorrect: I believe its $258,400.

"According to the survey, the national average salary for the CEO/Partner/Owner job function is $258,400."

I also believe Obama's threshhold is $250k/$200k (Family/Single).

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This is important. Small businesses provide the bulk of employment in the country, yet conservative policy for years has been to favor large businesses and celebrity CEO types at the expense of workers, small business owners, and fair taxation that benefits the commonwealth in areas such as transportation, public health, education, and other realms of American community. The neocons--who have kidnapped conservatism in the US (William F. Buckley's son, Christopher, is voting for Obama!)--are desperately trying to use iconic working-class figures to fool the real working people of our towns and cities to stab themselves in the back yet again, for the benefit of corporate feudalists.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization." We have seen what thirty years of economic anarchy has wrought in our economy; we have seen the shambles ruthless tax-cutting has done to our roads and bridges, our schools, our public health, and our climate.

Let's not be fooled again.

[This just in: "Joe the Plumber" is an unlicensed contractor who never studied plumbing--and whose business, if he did indeed go ahead and buy into it, would receive a tax cut under Obama's plan...and an increase under McCain's! Read about it in the New York Times, complete with Joe's racist allusion at the end.]