Last week my roommate shared this New York Times article about Obama’s economic policies on facebook. It’s an excellent article, and I can’t stop thinking about it, especially as I’ve been listening to the RNC on the radio and the Republican’s keep promising tax cuts as Republicans always do.

I wish I could tell everyone to read this article, but it’s pretty long, so let me point you to the really fascinating part on page 5 where the article looks at a comprehensive analysis of both presidential canidates tax plans by the Tax Policy Center. Let me quote the article to succinctly sum up the findings of the analysis:

For the bottom 80 percent of the population — those households making $118,000 or less — McCain’s various tax cuts would mean a net savings of about $200 a year on average. Obama’s proposals would bring $900 a year in savings. So for most people, Obama is the tax cutter in this campaign.

…

He would then pay for the cuts, at least in part, by raising taxes on the affluent to a point where they would eventually be slightly higher than they were under Clinton. For these upper-income families, the Tax Policy Center’s comparisons with McCain are even starker. McCain, by continuing the basic thrust of Bush’s tax policies and adding a few new wrinkles, would cut taxes for the top 0.1 percent of earners — those making an average of $9.1 million — by another $190,000 a year, on top of the Bush reductions. Obama would raise taxes on this top 0.1 percent by an average of $800,000 a year.

It’s hard not to look at that figure and be a little stunned. It would represent a huge tax increase on the wealthy families. But it’s also worth putting the number in some context. The bulk of Obama’s tax increases on the wealthy — about $500,000 of that $800,000 — would simply take away Bush’s tax cuts. The remaining $300,000 wouldn’t nearly reverse their pretax income gains in recent years. Since the mid-1990s, their inflation-adjusted pretax income has roughly doubled.

To put it another way, the wealthy have done so well over the past few decades, with their incomes soaring and tax rates plummeting, that Obama’s plan would not come close to erasing their gains. The same would be true of households making a few hundred thousand dollars a year (who have gotten smaller raises than the very rich but would also face smaller tax increases). As ambitious as Obama’s proposals might be, they would still leave the gap between the rich and everyone else far wider than it was 15 or 30 years ago. It just wouldn’t be quite as wide as it is now.

Here’s a chart from that Tax Policy Center analysis that I think makes it very easy to visualize each candidates policies:

So, to put this in human terms, what will help our country more in this time of economic downturn? Tax cuts for the lowest end of the economic spectrum, the people who are living paycheck to paycheck and are struggling to pay off credit card and other debts, or more tax cuts to the wealthiest of the wealthy? To quote the article once again:

It also seems fairly clear by now that tax cuts for the affluent do not necessarily trickle down to everyone else.

Can someone please explain to me how the Republican’s consistenly appeal to low income blue collar workers?