October 29, 2008
"John McCain and the Middle Class"
By Michael Dobbs
The principal McCain tax cut for middle-income Americans is a doubling of the dependent exemption, from $3,500 to $7,000, to be phased in over the next decade. In other words, if you are a married couple with two children, you will eventually be able to subtract $14,000 from your income for tax purposes. Clearly, the doubling of the dependent exemption does not benefit taxpayers without children who they can claim on their tax forms. Nor does it benefit low-income families with zero tax liability.
According to the Tax Foundation, the doubling of the dependent exemption would have resulted in lower taxes on 26 million returns filed in 2004 -- out of a total of 132 million returns. Nearly 96 million tax filers would have seen no benefit, either because they had no dependents or because they had no tax liability. Projected forward to 2009, it is reasonable to claim that 100 million tax filers would see no benefit from McCain's promised dependent exemption.