This week John McCain officially released the details of his economic recovery tax plan. The howls of protest from the left were both loud and predictable. The Obama campaign ripped into the McCain plan with the mantra of "tax cuts for the rich," while leftwing special interest groups claimed that McCain would blow a supersized hole in the budget deficit.
Yes, that bogeyman issue of the budget deficit is back again. That's the issue that's never an issue except when Republicans want to cut taxes, in which case deficits are suddenly one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Never mind that on Nancy Pelosi's watch the budget deficit has more than doubled--to $400 billion--in 18 months. That inconvenient truth hasn't stopped a barrage of attacks from the media and union-funded groups directed at McCain's "$5.7 trillion tax cut plan."
McCain wants to retain the Bush investment tax cuts; repeal the alternative minimum tax; cut the corporate income tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent, and offer Americans an alternative flat tax (an idea he borrowed from me, by the way). Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich calls the McCain tax cut "the most financially irresponsible plan I've seen in years." And even the newspaper I write for, the Wall Street Journal, joined in the charge of media skepticism with a headline that read: "McCain Tax Cuts Would Bloat Deficit or Take Huge Spending Curbs."
I'll get to the specifics of why these criticisms are misleading, but let's start with a quick
comparison of Senators Obama's and McCain's records on fiscal responsibility. Obama hasn't been in Washington for very long, but in his three years he's firmly entrenched himself among the bottom ten senators on the National Taxpayers Union scorecard of fiscal responsibility. On the same rating scale, McCain ranks as the third-most hostile senator to new spending. In his campaign promises, Obama has proposed $307.2 billion of new spending a year, which is about 40 times larger than the $6.9 billion in new spending that McCain has proposed.
Yet, we're to believe that it's John McCain who's going to pile debt on the backs of our children and Barack Obama who is going to balance the budget. This makes as much sense as picking Rex Grossman over Tom Brady in a fantasy football league.
Then there is the myth that Obama would cut taxes for the middle class, while McCain would only lavish tax cuts on the rich. Bill Clinton also famously touted a middle-class tax cut, and that promise lasted until about the third week of his presidency. The Obama promise to cut taxes on the middle class is an equal farce; it utterly ignores the $1.5 trillion cap and trade energy tax--a tax that (alas) McCain has also endorsed. A study by Laffer Associates found that this would be the biggest increase in taxes on the middle class in decades, and it didn't count the 1 million jobs that would be lost. So if the economic killer cap and trade is enacted (by Obama or McCain), middle-class taxes are going way, way up, not down.
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