Justin Wolfers wrote a great post over at Freakonomics using a couple different charts to show how the tax issue gets distorted. First, he grabbed a Washington Post graph showing the distributional impacts of the two candidate's plans. 
You can click on it for a slightly larger version. The basic takeaway is that in this graph, McCain looks to be the clear tax cutter. More brackets benefit under him than under Obama. But notice that little bracket connecting the bottom three lines: Those make up 60 percent of taxpayers, despite being only three of the nine categories on the chart. Then he snags a graph from chartjunk that offers the same information, but weighted for population. The size of the categories is keyed to the percent of the population. Now who's the taxcutter?
This goes to a point I've made a couple time over the course of the election: The press tends to report tax cuts in terms of aggregate impact on the federal treasury rather than the median impact on taxpayers. But individual taxpayers don't experience tax cuts in terms of the treasury. They experience it in terms of their tax bill. And because Obama weights his tax cut towards the middle class, which is rather a lot larger than the top one percent, he actually provides a much bigger tax cut to many more people than McCain, who managed to center his tax cut on the wealthy such that it costs more but helps fewer taxpayers.
You can click on it for a slightly larger version. The basic takeaway is that in this graph, McCain looks to be the clear tax cutter. More brackets benefit under him than under Obama. But notice that little bracket connecting the bottom three lines: Those make up 60 percent of taxpayers, despite being only three of the nine categories on the chart. Then he snags a graph from chartjunk that offers the same information, but weighted for population. The size of the categories is keyed to the percent of the population. Now who's the taxcutter?This goes to a point I've made a couple time over the course of the election: The press tends to report tax cuts in terms of aggregate impact on the federal treasury rather than the median impact on taxpayers. But individual taxpayers don't experience tax cuts in terms of the treasury. They experience it in terms of their tax bill. And because Obama weights his tax cut towards the middle class, which is rather a lot larger than the top one percent, he actually provides a much bigger tax cut to many more people than McCain, who managed to center his tax cut on the wealthy such that it costs more but helps fewer taxpayers. 
