"You can visit my website…"
That’s the catchphrase of the 21st-century politician, a handy response to any request for details about their positions and policy proposals – maybe they fear putting an audience to sleep, or perhaps they simply haven’t memorized them yet.
Just how many people take your average candidate up on the offer is another matter.
Jeffry Gramlich, a professor of financial accounting at USM, is one of the few people who can be counted on to wade through the many particulars now online. But even he is keenly aware of the shortcomings of all this transparency.
In August, Gramlich took the tax plans of both Republican presidential nominee John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, straight from their websites and speeches, and consolidated the information into an article for Knol, a Google-run knowledge base authored exclusively by experts and academics.
His summary, an effort to simplify and contrast the two candidates’ plans, rounded out at around 3,200 words.
"It turned into a relatively lengthy document," he says. "Most people I know, their eyes kind of glazed over."
Shortly after publishing the first draft, he was having coffee in the Old Port with friend Chris Houle, CEO of the Maine database software company Quantrix, when it occurred to them that the web offered more opportunities to make this information accessible – and relevant – to average citizens.
The result of that epiphony is a collaboration between Gramlich and the software maker, now up at electiontaxes.com. It is essentially a calculator, imbued with just about all the specifics of how each candidates plans to modify the tax code should they enter the Oval Office in 2009.
The tool allows anybody to enter in their own financial information, and immediately see how their taxes might be impacted by an Obama or McCain administration.
"I was confused, because both of them said they were going to save me taxes," said Gramlich. "I wanted to figure it out."
He won’t say which man turned out to be telling him the truth. But the Knol paper that informs the site’s algorithm makes some pretty clear distinctions between the two candidates’ plans: McCain favors accross-the-board tax cuts that primarily benefits the highest earners; Obama will only lower taxes for those earning less than $250,000 a year, raising them for those above that line, and his cuts will primarily benefit those with children.
The project has garnered a fair amount of press across the country; Quantrix reported 200,000 hits in the first 24 hours alone. Gramlich points out that the site has been getting a significant number repeat visitors, who for whatever reason have found themselves curious about different income levels over the past week.
Neither of the two major presidential campaigns will comment on the site, letting their own documents and a recent squabble at the first debate speak for themselves (neither the debate nor the recent Wall Streeet crisis has warranted an update to the application.)
But Gramlich takes the lack of any official refutations and the feedback he’s received from users as a testament to how non-partisan his goals are. Not that there has been any lack of complaining – many of the 15,000 comments posted at press time accuse the site of serious bias against the poster’s preferred candidate.
For his part, Gramlich sees any bias as strictly in the eye of the beholder.
"The main thing for me and Quantrix is that it does the right job," Gramlich says. "It makes no difference to me which candidate comes out ahead."