Monday, September 1, 2008

Do Obama's Tax and Spending Proposals Add Up?

This question is asked at Economists for Obama.

Their answer:

The short answer is maybe, but we don't know, because the Tax Policy Center hasn't published a full analysis yet.
They then quote Howard Gleckman, a former Business Week reporter:

... heard all at once, this catalogue is breathtaking: universal health care, higher education for every child, more money for early childhood education, rebuilding the military, $150 billion for alternative energy research, and tax cuts for small business and for "95 percent of all working families."

Last night, he insisted he would pay for it all. But how? All he told us was that he'd end the war in Iraq, close corporate tax loopholes, and eliminate wasteful and obsolete government programs.
This is, of course,impossible.

And EFO replies in part:

On the word "impossible," he links to the Tax Policy Center's analysis of McCain and Obama's tax proposals. A naive blog reader might expect that Gleckman means to imply that the TPC analysis backs up his conclusion. But in fact TPC has only looked at the tax side. There has been no similar analysis of the candidates' spending proposals.

I haven't tried to sum up the costs and saving of the various proposals, because it's a complicated task, and no one would trust our accounting to be objective anyway.
Ah, shouldn't somebody be adding this up? Not said, but implied, is that the Obama Campaign, itself, has not put out numbers that are sufficient to understand if his proposal adds up.

No comments:

Post a Comment