Green Cactus, since we are in an Obambi thread, lets look at an example of the affordability of McDonald's versus Applebee's for someone making $160k a year before and after Obambi raises taxes. (Note that I mentioned taxes, not just income taxes)
For the purpose of this discussion, let's say that an average meal at Applebee's will run a person $16 after tax and tip. (I haven't eaten at Applebee's in quite some time, so am using Carrow's or Coco's as a proxy and assuming a dinner plate of about $10, a soft drink of about $2.50 tax, and a small tip)
Let's say an average meal at McDonald's is $7. (It's been a while since I stooped so low as to eat at McDonald's, so I am using Jack in the Box, Carl's Jr. and Burger King as proxies)
The difference between the price of a single meal is $9.
Now let's take a look at Social Security taxes. (Payroll taxes are taxes too) Although Obama now claims he wants to subject incomes over $250k to Social Security taxes, this is a recent development. Though the majority of the campaign, he has said that he wants to eliminate the Social Security tax cap entirely. (As Nude correctly pointed out, you can't count on politicians keeping most of their election promises. But when a politician promises to raise your taxes, you can count on him exceeding everything he promised.) For 2008, that cap is $102,000.
This would subject our hypothetical person to Social Security taxes on an additional $58,000 in income.
At first glance, it would appear that this tax raise alone would amount to $4,437. That's enough to downgrade 493 Applebee's meals to McDonalds, or 1.35 meals a day.
But that is grossly underestimating the impact on the poor taxpayers culinary habits.
If the person in the hypothetical example is self employed, the hit is $8,874. This comes to 986 meal downgrades, or 2.7 meals a day.
But even if our hypothetical person is not self-employed, $4,437 is still to conservative. The increase in payroll taxes still results in $8,874 more going to the US government for Social Security taxes. The employee pays $4,437 extra and the employer matches that amount. Because the cost of keeping an employee goes up without a corresponding raise in productivity, the employer has to raise prices, lower employment levels, make future raises smaller, make less profit, or some combination of the previous choices. For this example, let's say that the employer and employee end up splitting the extra $4,437 that it costs the employer for that same employee. That results in a downgrade of 739.5 meals a year, or 2.03 meals a day.
Of course, that's just one of many taxes that Obambi wants to raise. You can't ignore the income tax increases, capital gains tax increases, and dividend income increases that are being promised.
The end result is that there are going to be a lot of Unhappy Meals for US taxpayers.