A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

If you are a New Yorker and pay taxes, you had better hope that John McCain wins the next election. Because if he doesn't, your taxes may skyrocket:

New York tax filers reporting more than $375,000 a year in earned income may end up paying nearly 60% of their wages in taxes to the government under a Barack Obama presidency, economists who have analyzed his plan said.

The Democratic presidential candidate is proposing not only raising the federal income tax, but also adding a Social Security tax for those Americans earning more than $250,000 a year. For New Yorkers, that could mean that if the current Social Security rate is applied, the marginal tax rate, or rate on every extra dollar earned, could rise to 58%.

"This is a very eye-popping number," a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Alan Viard, said.

Read it all. $375K per year is not chicken feed, but it's not all that much in the grand scheme of things either, what with college costs for kids, the cost of raising and educating them in the years before college and the costs of living in New York. In addition to all of these burdens, an Obama Administration is itching to impose a tax regime that will take away hard earned money from taxpayers and will slow down economic activity so significantly as to exacerbate any recession in which we may currently find ourselves.

I would, by the way, not be surprised in the slightest to find out that taxpayers in other states will find themselves under similarly oppressive tax regimes. Of course, the question of whether or not they will be taxed to death depends on how they vote in the upcoming Presidential election.