Terre Haute for Obama

Daily Talking Points

April 15, 2008

Message of the day: A middle class tax cut for working families

• On this Tax Day, Barack Obama is talking about how he’ll roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and give a middle class tax cut to working families to help them pay rising costs.

• Barack Obama believes that while this is supposed to be a day when we pay what we owe to the government, it’s become a day when George Bush’s Washington rewards its friends on Wall Street. John McCain used to oppose the Bush tax cuts. He used to say that he couldn’t support a tax cut where “so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate.” He used to say that tax cuts in a time of war were a bad idea, and that they violated his “conscience.” But somewhere along the way to the Republican nomination, he figured that he had to stop speaking his mind and start towing the line – because now he wants to make those tax cuts permanent.

• America can’t afford four more years of the failed Bush policies, and that’s what Senator McCain is offering. We need to roll back the Bush-McCain tax cuts and invest in things like health care that are really important. Instead of giving tax breaks to the wealthy who don’t need them and weren’t even asking for them, we should be putting a middle class tax cut into the pockets of working families. That’s why Barack Obama is the only candidate in this race who’s proposed a tax cut that would save our families $1,000 a year, and eliminate income taxes entirely for seniors making less than $50,000.