After almost a decade of dissembling by George W. Bush about tax and budget matters, will John McCain get away with the same approach?

McCain’s misleading claims about Barack Obama raising taxes on small business continue to be repeated by the press:

Washingtonpost.com’s The Trail blog, CNN, and CBSNews.com each repeated Sen. John McCain’s false claim that “[i]f you are one of the 23 million small business owners in America who files as an individual rate payer, Senator [Barack] Obama is going to raise your tax rates.” In fact, Obama has proposed rolling back President Bush’s tax cuts only on “people who are making 250,000 dollars a year or more”; according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, only 481,000 small businesses fall into the tax brackets that would be affected by those increases.

On the upside, however, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder debunked the con:

The Republicans and John McCain in particular are trotting out a tiresome and thoroughly debunkable claim about Barack Obama’s tax plans — namely, that could hit as many as 23 million small businesses. The McCain campaign credulously cites the obviously self-interested Chamber of Commerce, which counts as a small business any entity or individual who reports any income under Schedule C of the federal income tax return or anyone who organizes a Subchapter S corporation. Hence: 23 million. As Factcheck.org says, that’s misleading — generously put. The real pool of small businesses with employees is around six million, and an estimate of the number of proprietorship paying into the top two income brackets is less than 700,000 — a lot, but about 2.5% of 23 million.

McCain is also still making false claims about the effects of tax cuts and tax increases on revenue as well (via Ezra Klein):

“You can’t get over the fact that historically when you raise people’s taxes, revenue goes down,” he said. “Every time we cut capital gains taxes, there has been an increase in revenues.”

While these claims (which he has made repeatedly) get far too little attention, the New York Times did take him to task in an article last week:

And when Mr. McCain first outlined his tax cut proposals shortly before the South Carolina primary in January, he highlighted his new enthusiasm for supply-side economics. “Don’t listen to this siren song about cutting taxes,” Mr. McCain said then. “Every time in history we have raised taxes it has cut revenues.” Of course, history is full of tax increases that raised revenues, just as planned, and many economists deride the notion that broad-based tax cuts will spur enough economic growth to raise tax revenues over all.

For more on why capital gains tax cuts don’t increase revenue overall, see the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Also, see Brad DeLong on how McCain’s budget doesn’t add up.

The press has no excuse for giving McCain a pass this time around. He’s using the same playbook as Bush.