Have you seen the new tax calculators produced by the Obama and McCain campaigns? The idea is simple enough—make tax real for ordinary voters. Instead of talking about trillions of dollars or 95 percent of working families, describe what an Obama or McCain presidency would mean for real taxpayers.

The ordinarily very astute EconomistMom blithely asserted that there is "a lot of historical evidence suggesting that one-party government tends toward fiscal irresponsibility." Maybe not. Some time ago, I asked Urban Institute RA, Sonya Hoo, to review the evidence from states, over time, and across countries. She found the evidence of such an effect to be quite ambiguous.

A few more thoughts on "Barack the wealth spreader," as Sarah Palin now describes the Democratic nominee. I'm inspired in part by commenter D.F., who wrote this morning, "Tax rebates don't work. We need a flat tax." First off, John McCain is right when he says Obama's tax plan is redistributionist, if by that he means his rival would give his biggest tax cuts to the lowest earners. TPC calculates that Obama would cut the average tax rate for the lowest 20 percent of earners by more than 5 percent while he'd raise the rate by a roughly equal amount for the top 1 percent.

John McCain says Barack Obama’s enthusiasm for refundable tax credits amounts to socialism. Wow. This is interesting for so many reasons. To start, the mother of all refundable credits is the Earned Income Credit, which is the largest poverty program in the U.S. and distributes $42 billion to more than 20 million low-income families. It was enacted during the Presidency of well-known leftist Gerald Ford, and has been expanded repeatedly ever since, most recently by President Bush in 2001.

Poor Joe the Plumber has become a political metaphor: something no one ever wants to be. As we all know by now, based on his actual (rather than aspirational) income of $40,000, Joe would get a slightly bigger tax cut under President Obama than President McCain. But in one sense, even though the real Joe doesn’t own a business, most small business owners, like Joe, also have very modest incomes. Based on a sample of individual income tax returns, TPC finds that among tax units that receive most of their income from their own business, a partnership or a farm (reported on schedules C, E, or F), more than half have income below $30,000 and 80 percent make less than $100,000. (Table T07-0206)