Over the weekend, the Over the weekend, the NY Times ran a story about how the financial plans of each of the three candidates held one thing in common: each would raise the budget deficit by "trillions of dollars." What's odd, other than the Times' newfound interest in avoiding budget deficits, is how they don't pass judgment on the substance of how each candidate will put us in the red -- it's all bad.
For instance, they provide a little chart with the "highlights" of each plan, broken down by "costs" and "savings." Virtually all of John McCain's costs are revenue-starving measures -- eliminating the AMT, cutting the corporate tax rate, and doubling the personal exemptions for dependents. For both Democrats, the costs are entirely new expenditures: mandatory health insurance, developing alternative sources of energy, matching savings in government-created retirement accounts, expanding foreign aide, and increased education spending.
Now these are the "highlights" I'm focusing on, and surely the full financial picture is more complex, but isn't the implication that these are the biggest features of each candidate's respective budget plan? Why would anything with a higher price tag be left off a list of "highlights?" I bring this up because when you add up the costs and savings for each candidate, they aren't particularly equal. McCain leaves us $15 billion in the red, Hillary puts us $8 billion in the black, and Obama leaves us with a $33 billion deficit. Moreover, some of these plans are incomplete. Both McCain and Obama have "cut wasteful programs" on their savings list, without further specification, and only McCain's is given a dollar value ($65 billion). McCain also has "generate economic growth ($20 billion)" listed as a saving, but without more specifics we'll have to assume this growth is generated by magic. Obama has three items without dollar amounts attached to them -- savings from ending the Iraq War, auctioning permits for greenhouse gases and the afore-mentioned wasteful programs cut -- which makes it difficult to put together a real financial picture.
I was left more confused than informed by the piece. The impression it gives is that McCain's huge tax cuts are just as bad as spending on education, health care and alternative energy; this despite lines in the article like
With the national debt soaring to $9.1 trillion from $5.6 trillion at the start of 2001, in part because of the Iraq war and Mr. Bush’s tax cuts, a crucial question about the candidates to succeed him is “whether they are helping to fill the hole or make it deeper,” said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan organization that advocates deficit reduction. “With the proposals they have on the table, it looks to me like all three would make it deeper.”
And
Fiscal monitors say it is harder to compute the effect of the Democratic candidates' measures because they are more intricate. They estimate that, even taking into account that there are some differences between the proposals by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the impact of either on the deficit would be less than one-third that of the McCain plan.
So, war spending and tax cuts are bad, right? Doesn't that make McCain's plan seem especially irresponsible, given that all his costs are in precisely in those two areas, again, according to the highlights chart? And McCain will put us deeper in the red than the Democrats, according to the CBO (whose report isn't even linked to in the piece) -- do I have that right? I'm not clear why the Times went to all the trouble to find equivalence in these plans where there really is none.
--Mori Dinauer
