The author - college dropout with no background in stats, science, or economics might be forgiven for directly quoting from the notable Mark Howard who writes for "News Corpse" (no, no typo there) and has a strong academic background in, well, nothing his bio says only "Mark Howard is an artist and author and the publisher of News Corpse, the Internet's Chronicle of Media Decay. His political and socially disruptive artwork has been displayed internationally, usually without permission"

Now, Howard cites his sources - horribly - serious Joel check the link and try to find the data, apparently chronicling Media Decay is best done by imitating it so it doesn't notice I guess.

So I ran down his links, one to a page of him citing something completely else and ranting - though it did link to a six year old study by PIPA, which is his major source of info, and dam good idea to have a second source to contrast with U of M, except PIPA is from U of M, damn! So the analysis is merely a report on the study in the original link on page this thread was linked to... I ran some numbers.

Strangely income taxes only came up twice in the U of M questionnaire and the first question, Q7j just asked people how much taxes influenced their vote, the second, Q11 IIRC asked if they had paid more income tax, and when adding the number who said up a lot and up a little you don't get 49%, but 43% for the GOP, and the Dems answered 36% on that (I think the author must have missed that during his apparently ardous and professional fact checking )

Of course, they might not be stupid just wrong, only they might not be wrong either, I'm too lazy to check data on this but it would seem a safe bet that the "Your" in this question should be answered with up by many people, since many people still get raises even in suck-ass economies, and even if the raise didn't keep up with inflation - and for a lot of individual people it has, that would still be 'up'. Considering someone could truthfully answer up after getting a 2% cut in tax rate after getting a 5% raise with a promotion - not really all that uncommon an occurrence - interpreting the respondents as stupid from that does kinda make me roll my eyes at the author's own intellect.