If enacted, the Obama and McCain tax plans would have radically different effects on the distribution of tax burdens in the United States. The Obama tax plan would make the tax system significantly more progressive by providing large tax breaks to those at the bottom of the income scale and raising taxes significantly on upper-income earners. The McCain tax plan would make the tax system more regressive, even compared with a system in which the 2001–06 tax cuts are made permanent. It would do so by providing relatively little tax relief to those at the bottom of the income scale while providing huge tax cuts to households at the very top of the income distribution.
Yep, McCain's tax plan--which would be dead on arrival in a Democratic Congress anyway, but is still valuable as a statement of principle--is even more regressive than Bush's. Obama and McCain may be unique candidates in any number of respects, but at the end of the day the defining fact of politics in America remains that we have one party whose fiscal policies primarily benefit the rich and one whose fiscal policies primarily benefit the working class.
--Josh Patashnik