Christie McCoy of Lawrence
To the editor:
While John McCain continues to repeat, in mantra-like invocations, that Barack Obama will “increase your taxes,” the reality we need to worry about is the exact opposite of what Sen. McCain says. The McCain-Palin plan intends, for the first time ever in U.S. history, to tax our health insurance benefits and thereby hike our income taxes.
Sen. McCain offers to give every family a $5,000 tax credit for health insurance. What he doesn’t tell you is that the average family health plan actually costs about $12,000 (slightly more in NJ). This means that for a typical policy you would deduct $5,000 from your income as a credit, but you would then owe tax on the remaining $7,000. Thus, if you are in a 25 percent tax bracket, Sen. McCain will sock your family with a tax increase of $1,750 (25 percent of $7,000). Under present laws employer-paid health insurance is not a taxable benefit, so what Sen. McCain has in mind is a tax hike, pure and simple.
Despite this, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin continue to chant, ad nauseam, that under an Obama administration your taxes will go up. Both of them know full well that Sen. Obama wants to cut income taxes for households earning less than $250,000 and opposes the McCain health-tax scheme, yet they desperately continue with this misrepresentation. If they believe they are being truthful then they are sorely deficient in basic arithmetic skills.
Taxing the health care of working middle-class families at a time of economic turmoil, while giving $300 billion in proposed tax cuts to corporations and the wealthiest five percent of taxpayers, is yet another example of the confused and ill-conceived economic theories of McCain-Palin. We can’t afford John McCain’s tax increases on health benefits — we need to elect Barack Obama on Nov. 4.
Christe McCoy
Lawrence

