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Howard Gleckman of Brookings Tax Policy Center has 7 questions for Barack Obama, all of them good ones. My favorites are:
• When House Ways & Means Committee Charlie Rangel proposed a major reform of the tax code back in October, you said you hadn't a chance to read it. I know you've been busy, but it has been four months. So, what do you think?• Your tax agenda is filled with, may I say, narrow (Bill) Clintonesque tax cuts for various interest groups. That doesn’t sound like much of a "change" agenda. What is your transformative tax policy?• You say you'd push for bipartisan legislation. But your tax plan would provide new refundable tax credits to encourage low income people to buy a house, care for their children, save for college, and even work. You have some new small business breaks, but you'd raise taxes on oil and gas producers, multinational business, and repeal the Bush tax cuts for high-income individuals. What makes you think any Republican would vote for that?• You have said nothing about the Alternative Minimum Tax, a trillion dollar problem over the next decade. What would you do about it?• How will you control the spiraling costs of Medicare and Medicaid? Your health plan would actually expand Medicaid. Except for cutting subsidies to managed care plans, you have no proposal to control Medicare spending. Health IT, and disease and chronic care management may help slow the growth of overall medical costs, but no one believes they will solve the problem.He's also got seven questions for John McCain, which are even better:
• You promise to repeal the alternative minimum tax. That alone would add more than $1 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. You also want to cut corporate taxes. How would you pay for it all?• You want to cut the size of government, but how? Eliminating earmarks is nice, but trashing every one would save only about $18 billion a year. The latest Bush budget would add more than $1 trillion to the national debt over five years, even before we fully pay for the Iraq war and an AMT fix. Exactly what other programs would you eliminate?• What would you do about entitlement spending? You say you support bipartisan reform of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but what would it look like?• You vow to reduce health care spending through better use of disease management and information technology and by giving consumers more control over their care. But let's talk straight: Do we need to ration care to truly manage costs? If so, who will do it?• You say we could be in Iraq for 100 years and you support a major missile defense system, as well as an expanded military. How would you finance these priorities, which are likely to cost hundreds of billions of dollars?The queries for Clinton are forthcoming.
