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Another Barack Obama first:
He is the first U.S. president to invite Americans to play computer games.
Barack Obama did so this week when he announced what the White House called "a bold plan for tax fairness and job creation."
The plan is a set of proposals to crack down on overseas tax havens and, the president said, to encourage job creation at home.
“While hard working Americans pay our fair share,” Mitch Stewart, the Obama campaign's director of Organizing for America, told supporters in a weekend e-mail, “some of the largest, most powerful interests exploit tax loopholes that actually reward companies for creating jobs overseas and allow them to use tax shelters to avoid paying their rightful share.”
Enter the “Tax Fairness Calculator.”
The online device allows taxpayers to easily calculate the approximate difference in taxes they pay on their income, compared to what a U.S. multinational corporation would pay on the same dollar amount of foreign income. Approximate averages are based on data from the Congressional Budget Office and Treasury Department estimates.
It's a pretty clever little gimmick, actually, and another example of the Barack Obama's computer-based election campaign moving with him and his staff into the White House.
Click here to see the Tax Fairness Calculator. You can enter what you earn, find out what the average American owes on that amount, and then see how much more you would pay on that income if you were a multi-national corporation.
And, yes indeed... unless your household income is $9,241 a year, or less, you will be paying more. In fact, the more you earn the more “more” you will be paying. Try it out.
Before you play, take note of the president's warning: “Using this tax calculator may fill you with an irresistible urge to fix this broken system. Fortunately, that's exactly what we can do -- if we act together,” he says.
“The special interests will fight hard for the status quo, and their lobbyists are already swarming in Washington,” Mitch Stewart said in his e-mail. “Now we have to stand up and show how much support the President's proposals really have out here in America. These proposals are a key part of the President's plan to get our economy back on track, and it's time for us to stand up and help make it happen," he wrote to supporters.
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