The latest inanity from the AP:

John McCain and Barack Obama share common ground on a surprising selection of issues where the age-old Republican-Democratic divide doesn’t cut it anymore.

Both want the United States to join the campaign against global warming in earnest. Both want to cut taxes for the middle class.

Yeah, Obama and McCain are pretty similar… just like Bush and Gore were pretty similar. Does the media ever tire of this old turn-off-the-voters whopper?

Let’s set aside the environmental “earnestness” issue for the moment. As for “cutting taxes for the middle class,” I guess that depends on what the “middle class” is; if you take McCain’s definition, that you’re not rich unless you make $5 million a year, then yeah, I guess you could say that McCain wants to enrich the “middle class.”

However, most views of the middle class are not quite as stratospheric as McCain’s bizarre view suggests. A common range is quoted as $25,000 to $100,000, with the actual middle 20% of the country making between $40,000 and $95,000. The mean annual income for the U.S. in 2005 was $33,000.

By these measures, McCain and Obama are not on the same page. At the $33,000 level, Obama wants to give tax cuts eight times bigger than McCain. McCain’s tax cuts are meager for the poor and only grow as incomes grow, and up to $112,000, McCain still doesn’t give as much as Obama. Only when you go above $112,000–arguably the “upper middle class”–does McCain even begin to out-give Obama. But McCain does not even double what Obama offers until after $250,000, where Obama ends his tax cuts.

If you were able to go through the $25,000 to $100,000 range and compare each plan’s averages, then you’d find that while both “want to cut taxes for the middle class,” one of them wants to do it a lot more than the other one. Painting them as “similar” on this is like saying that they are “similar” on abortion rights because neither likes the ideas of abortion per se. Everyone has “similarities” on just about every issue; what is key is whether the similarities outweigh the differences. Here, they don’t.