Alex Brill and Alan Viard show that Obama’s tax plan raises rates sharply, not only for the wealthy, but for most of the middle class. (HT: Greg Mankiw)
The View from Alexandria
In advanced civilizations the period loosely called Alexandrian is usually associated with flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads—in short, a falling away (which is all that decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and inforced from within. — Jacques Barzun
The View from Alexandria 
I am one of the authors of the article about Obama’s tax plan that is mentioned here. I want to clarify that our article does not find “middle class tax increases” under Obama’s plan in the sense of higher tax payments by the middle class. As our article makes clear, most people would pay lower taxes under Obama’s plan because he would cut taxes for the lower and middle classes.
The point of our article, available at
http://www.american.com/archive/2008/august-08-08/the-folly-of-obama2019s-tax-plan
is that Obama’s tax cuts are designed in ways that raise MARGINAL tax rates and therefore reduce incentives to earn income. The marginal rate rises because the size of the tax cut falls as income rises. But, tax payments are lower under Obama’s plan (than under current law) at all of the income levels discussed in our article. The statement in this post that Obama’s tax plan “raises rates” should be amended to “raises marginal rates.”
Alan D. Viard, Resident Scholar
American Enterprise Institute
Thanks for the correction.