Today's first stop on the Double Talk Express:
Senator McCain has been argueing that Senator Obama's plan to repeal President Bush’s tax cuts on the top 2% of the country, would raise taxes for the “23 million small business owners.”
I'm sure you all will be surprised to learn that this is false.
First according to the IRS latest stats there are 21.5 million "schedule C" class businesses in the US. Now these stats are a few years old, so it could be 23 million, but there is a good chance that it is less.
Then McCain assumes that out of every one of the 23 million small businesses that files, that they makes over $250,000 annually, which is the threshold at which the proposed tax hike would actually kick in.
Think Progress quotes the Tax Policy Center, who found that only 1.4 percent of people defined by the Treasury Department as small-business owners are in the top two tax brackets, and so would be subject to higher taxes. I will spell this out for any conservatives out there, that means 98.6% of small business owners would not be affected by this tax hike.
Additionally, Jay Newton-Small of Time Magazine did some fact checking, and he found that 94.5 percent of small business owners actually reported an income of below $100,000; so over 22 milion out of the 23 million small businesses in the US would not be effected by Obama's proposed tax hike. In fact there are only a few hundred thousand small businesses who net more than $250,000 a year, and nowhere near the 23 million that McCain suggests.
Therefore John McCain is lying.
posted by jrolsen 
