So I spent a little time noodling around the McCain campaign website, and maybe this is buried deep in the site somewhere and I missed it, but shouldn’t the site have a place where you can calculate, even roughly, how much Obama’s tax hike plans will cost you? Certainly taxes is a huge issue, being a hardy GOP perennial, an issue on which Obama has been backtracking, and the focus of several of McCain’s recent ads, like this one:

I recall the tax cut calculator being a popular feature of Bush’s site in 2000, back in the Stone Age of web campaigns. But you can’t do anything similar on McCain’s site. The “Issues” section of McCain’s site also has no separate page on taxes. (On a related note, the RNC website’s “Obama Spendometer” link no longer leads you to anything – maybe Obama broke it?)

I realize that Obama’s tax plans can be hard to pin down, and that there are challenges presented in trying to corral the many different taxes he is proposing to raise, like capital gains, dividend, payroll, and estate taxes, as well as indirect taxes like energy and corporate taxes (in the latter case, as with gas taxes, he’s opposing McCain’s proposed cuts) and tariffs. But calculations for particular people presumably can be done, at least in a rough-estimate sort of way, and the numbers they give you can be eye-popping especially for groups like upper-middle-class professionals and small business people who the GOP has been weaker with in recent elections.