Yesterday’s big news was John McCain’s “plan” to eliminate a $410 billion deficit in just four years. He didn’t get around to explaining how, exactly, he planned to do this, but the McCain campaign is very excited about the vague generalities it presented the public.
Now that everyone’s had a chance to review McCain’s “policy,” are analysts and experts as impressed as the Republican candidate’s aides? Not so much.
The package of spending and tax cuts proposed by Senator John McCain is unlikely to achieve his goal of balancing the federal budget by 2013, economists and fiscal experts said Monday.
“It would be very difficult to achieve in the best of circumstances, and even more difficult under the policies that Senator McCain has proposed,” said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group.
Apparently, people capable of doing arithmetic find it hard to believe that John McCain can cut taxes by about a trillion dollars, eliminate the AMT, keep two wars going indefinitely, increase the Pentagon’s budget, and eliminate a $410 billion deficit in four years. Go figure.
J. Bradford DeLong, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, explained, “Senator McCain and his advisers want to claim they will balance the budget by 2013, but they have given us no clue and no plan to meet all the commitments he has made and still get there.”
Given how utterly ridiculous the McCain campaign’s claims are, what was the headline on the front page of the LA Times this morning? “Obama’s agenda may not add up.”
That’s not a typo. The moment we learn that McCain’s numbers don’t resemble reality in any way, the LAT fronts a piece questioning the Obama campaign’s budget.
What’s worse, the LAT piece isn’t just poorly timed, it’s also surprisingly misleading.
In more than a year of campaigning, Barack Obama has made a long list of promises for new federal programs costing tens of billions of dollars, many of them aimed at protecting people from the pain of a souring economy.
But if he wins the presidency, Obama will be hard-pressed to keep his blueprint intact. A variety of budget analysts are skeptical that the Democrat’s agenda could survive in the face of large federal budget deficits and the difficulty of making good on his plan to raise new revenue by closing tax loopholes, ending the Iraq war and cutting spending that is deemed low-priority.
Like predecessors who also had to square far-reaching promises with inescapable budget realities, they say, a President Obama might need to jettison pieces of Obama-ism.
Now, for what it’s worth, it’s practically impossible to write a flawless budget document in the midst of a presidential campaign. No one really expects perfection and precision. A candidate can and will get slammed if they follow McCain’s route — basically, present a Magic Pony-style budget plan — but what we’re looking for here is some sense of a candidate’s priorities and willingness to be realistic.
And the irony is, while McCain is engaging in foolish flights of fancy, Obama’s numbers actually add up fairly well.
[D]espite the story’s headline (“Obama’s agenda may not add up”), here’s what surprised me once I read down to the meat of the story: his agenda actually does come pretty close to adding up. It’s really not normal for a candidate’s budget numbers to be even in the near ballpark of making sense, but by the Times’ own reckoning (chart here) Obama is proposing $130 billion in new spending if every single one of his priorities is signed into law, and probably two-thirds of that is credibly accounted for by rolling back some of the Bush tax cuts, withdrawing from Iraq, auctioning emission credits, and a few other things. So even in the unlikely event that Obama gets every single thing he wants, he’d only be adding a net of $30-40 billion to the federal budget.
So, sure, that means it doesn’t add up. But when was the last time we had a presidential candidate who came even that close? Hell, I think McCain’s plan, if you put a number to it, would fail to add up by about ten times that amount. Obama’s is the most restrained, least pandering budget plan we’ve seen in a presidential campaign for a very long time.
Quite right. But what the public will hear is that both candidates are playing fast and loose, neither campaign can offer numbers that add up, and neither are being responsible.
That will be misleading, but then again, most campaign reporting usually is.