According to CBS News, for the second day in a row, Sarah Palin focused the entirety of her attacks against Barack Obama on the Democratic nominee’s tax plan, rather than his personal associations.

“Just yesterday, we learned that America’s GDP actually fell in the third quarter of this year, and that confirms what we already know, and that’s that our economy right now is shrinking,” Palin said. “This is the worst possible time to raise taxes, but Barack Obama still wants to.”

Palin repeated her mantra that Obama has “an ideological commitment” that compels him to raise taxes.

“Now, his whole tax plan, really, it is, it’s so phony that it’s already starting to unravel, and we’re gonna call it the way that we see it,” she said.

Palin said that Obama’s definition of what constitutes the middle class seems to be evolving.

“And just this morning, Gov. Bill Richardson, a top surrogate for the Obama campaign, he who is working so hard to get Obama elected, Richardson said Obama’s tax plan would define middle class as $120,000 a year and under,” Palin said. “So now, we’re down to less than half the original income level and, just give it a little more time, and Barack Obama will be back to raising taxes on folks earning $42,000 a year.”

Appearing on KOAM radio this morning, Richardson said, “What Obama wants to do is he is basically looking at $120,000 and under among those that are in the middle class, and there is a tax cut for those,” according to a YouTube clip of the interview.

Richardson’s comments appear to have been a slip of the tongue, since the Obama campaign has not announced that it has changed its policy that everyone making less than $200,000 a year would get a tax cut and no one making under $250,000 a year would be burdened with a tax increase.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the Obama-Palin Tax Plan. The true definition of the Obama tax plan appears to be elusive; it seems that everyone has a different opinion of exactly who will pay more, and who will pay under the democrat’s plan. Is it “fair and balanced”? It depends who you ask!

According to the Washington Post, new analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain are both proposing tax plans that would result in cuts for most American families. Obama’s plan gives the biggest cuts to those who make the least, while McCain would give the largest cuts to the very wealthy. For the approximately 147,000 families that make up the top 0.1 percent of the income scale, the difference between the two plans is stark. While McCain offers a $269,364 tax cut, Obama would raise their taxes, on average, by $701,885 - a difference of nearly $1 million.

Here is your tax savings based on your annual earnings:

*the numbers have been rounded

In just a few days, Americans will be deciding the future path of the country.  One of most important issues of many Americans is how will the John McCain and Barack Obama tax plans affect them personally.  That answer may be the determining factor of who is elected commander-in-chief.

Almost all of the federal tax cuts enacted since 2001, expire in 2010. AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) may end up hitting millions of middle class Americans.  Both of the candidates are proposing major tax changes, but each will have a dramatically different effect on each taxpayer and on the country as a whole.

Senator Barrack Obama’s tax plan calls for giving large tax breaks to middle and lower class Americans, while raising taxes significantly to those of upper-income earners.  John McCain’s plan calls for providing little relief to those at the bottom, while providing huge tax cuts to households at the very top.

In reviewing the two plans, Obama’s tax plans appears to be a conventional Democratic tax plan. It calls for cutting the middle class and lower class taxes (initially $1000 in 2009 while John McCain’s plan would provide $300 in tax relief), at the cost of raising the national debt by a staggering #3.3 trillion over the next ten years. However, the proposed plan raises some question about the ability to raise enough revenue to cover the plan.  Preliminary analysis has been unable to verify $900 billion of the revenue identified in his plan

McCain’s tax plan is as Repubican and Obama’s is Democratic. The top 20% of taxpayers get a 3% reduction in after-tax income in 2009, while the lowest-earning 60% would get less than 1%.