In the interests of fairness, here's an article by Jared Bernstein about McCain's economic plans.
As I stress here , McCain's plans to pay for these tax cuts amount to filling a crater with a teaspoon of sand. Earmarks won't get you there, so he'll have to go after discretionary spending. In fact, he's already suggesting a freeze in such spending, excluding defense, of course. Sound inoffensive until you consider that we're talking about kids' health care, education, child care, training for displaced workers, environmental and labor protections, and dozens more programs that lots of people actually need and care about.
Plus, he can't fill the hole he's dug with cuts in these programs either, which leads you to the inevitable punch line of all this: his target is the entitlements, Social Security and Medicare. Those programs have always been the big enchiladas for the Norquist shock troops and they've never recovered from their Social Security privatization defeat. Well, they're back, incognito.
And here:
His most common target is earmarks -- those provisions quietly embedded in legislation to steer funding to some desired project or constituency. But there are two problems here, one big, one little. The big one is that the total earmark bill is much too small to pay for even a tiny fraction of McCain's agenda. Most estimates score them at around $20 billion per year, though the McCain folks say they can get up to $60 billion. That's a few months in Iraq, John
Let's also ask how his removal of the tax break for business's to provide health insurance to their employees and giving it to individuals is actually going to mean real savings.
