October 27, 2008, 5:54 PM — There's a lot of issues that impact voters' decisions, including taxes. A business-school professor and a business modeling software developer have teamed up to help voters evaluate, side-by-side, the tax proposals of Senators Barack Obama and John McCain.
Grab your 1040 from last year, and visit http://www.electiontaxes.com. Enter in data (no name, Social Security number, or other personal identifying information required) and you can see how you fare under each candidate.
The site is powered by Quantrix 64, a business modeling and analytics application from Quantrix (http://www.quantrix.com). The company teamed with Jeff Gramlich, a professor at the University of Southern Maine to develop the model. Quantrix 64 features an API that can be integrated with Ajax-based tools such as Google Web Toolkit to enable companies to deploy and run models online. With 250 formulas, and a custom-developed user interface, the model is deployed on three 64-bit Linux servers to control load balance.
You can check out what some other news sources have said about ElectionTaxes:
-- The AP story on the model is here: (http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2008/09/26/1915612-online-tool-estimates-t...)
-- The New York Times new blog on economics (appropriately titled "Economix") covered the story on Oct. 14 (http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/obama-and-mccain-tax-calcul...)
-- And you can learn more about Quantrix 64 here: http://www.quantrix.com/story.php?news_id=33
