McCain should cut taxes on the poor.

I, however, do not use deciles to define poor...I use orders of magnitude.

To me, anyone making less than $100,000 is poor.  I say this because even with deflated house prices, the monthly mortgage is still out of reach, or a significant drain on income.

I define middle class as making $100,000 to $1 Million.

I define rich as making more than $1 Million.

You're deciles don't show the actually income associated with those groups, however, I notice that the highest taxed groups are decile 3 and 4 -- who probably would fall well within my definition of Poor.

What I see is that the taxes fall heaviest on the poor working man.  The guy who does or has to take a car to work.  Or the roofer or contractor who has to drive a truck.

In addition to reducing the gas tax, I have proposed that McCain cut income tax on the Poor (defined here as <$100K) to a maximum rate of 10%.

At this point in time, one of the biggest problems in our country has been the unbridled growth of government.   Anything we can do to reduce taxes and reduce government overburdens will help us.

J. Bailo Participant Texeme.Construct()

...your personal definitions of poor and middle class are the highest I've ever seen.

By your definition, the vast majority of the United States is considered poor.  The average income is slightly more than $45,000 per year.

Heck, by your definition, every country in the world is poor except Luxemburg, which at $109,000 per capita, is just barely middle class.

I tend to agree that a gasoline tax wouldn't be really all that regressive due to the factors you pointed out, but we are also relying a lot on very old data.  Five year old data might not seem that old, but in the context of gasoline, where prices have roughly doubled in the last 5 years, it is probably something that should be brought up.

It seems then that households are spending much more that 3-5% on gas, even with wage increases and inflation.  It is probably closer to 5-7%.  If that is the case, a gas tax can be seen in two ways.  

One it is marginally not a big increase since the price is already so high and a lot of states tend to do it on a cent per gallon basis, rather than a percent of price basis.

Second, and alternatively, an increase might start to get into the very elastic territory where an extra couple of cents might start pushing out the lowest income consumers who must really face a tough choice.  

I would also also wonder if poorer people have to live further away from work than higher income people do.  The theory would be that the places closest to work likely have higher real estate costs than those that are far away in the suburbs.  I could be entirely wrong, but I have heard that thrown out a lot.  

I would also also wonder if poorer people have to live further away from work than higher income people do

I have little data on it, but I'd say no.  Most people with lower incomes live and work in the inner cities.  Whereas people of higher incomes tend to live in the suburbs and commute into the city.

In america, the poor masses aren't shoved to outer fringes of the cities, they're compacted inwards.