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Website Tells You Which Candidate is Best for You
Website Tells You Which Candidate is Best for You 10/25/12
CBS 7 Reporter
smurray@cbs7.com
October 25, 2012
Odessa, TX - A new political website claims it can determine which presidential candidate is best for you. And the site is gaining popularity in the weeks before the election. It launched a month ago and already has more than 2.5 million hits.
Politify.com shows you personal, local and national financial projections based on a candidate’s policy.
"We want to have people make decisions based on how the candidates will actually impact them and the people they know," says CEO and Founder Nikita Bier.
For example if you're 50 years old, married, making $50,000 a year, with 2 dependents the net change to your income under President Obama is an addition of nearly $5,000 and under Governor Romney it’s nearly $4,000.
Bier claims the formula is basic arithmetic.
"So we take Romney’s plan, and we quantify it to the best of our ability,” Bier explains. “He hasn't specified a lot of cuts but he has specified that he will eliminate the 2009 credits passed under Obama and that he will cut taxes across the board 20% and so that's in our model. We also use Obama’s 2013 budget."
The site also takes tax benefits and federal services into account
"That’s where we allocate all of the federal line items to every single household in the united states based on their demographic traits so if you have 2 kids and a candidate is proposing a cut to education, were going to give you double the impact of a household with 1 kid," Bier says.
"It is nothing more than a propaganda tool,” says Political Talk Show Host Jason Moore.
Moore says he doesn't buy it, especially when looking at the local impact.
"In Odessa, 77% [benefited from] Obama, 23% [benefited from] Romney. It’s almost directly inverse to what the votes going to be on November 6th,” he says. “Even though it says non partisan, I don't believe there's any such thing. Did they take into account Midland and Odessa and the cost associated with an increased EPA? Increased regulations on drilling, the taking of land, the prevention of oil and gas drilling?"
Moore says it all depends on how you look at it.
"See this is considered a negative in their mind, to have less tax revenue, but to me its positive. Thank goodness the government is going to have almost a trillion dollars less to blow," Moore says. "It depends on how you define "benefits from." If your goal is to get more money from the government well of course you're going to benefit more by using Barack Obama’s plan."
But the site claims their goal isn't to change people's minds but the way they think.
"At the very least were shifting the conversation away from rhetoric and to us that's a victory because politics up until this point has really not been about policy its been about personalities," Bier says.
The site is funded through grant money. If you want to check it out for yourself and plug in your own information visit www.politify.com