McCain, Obama trade jabs over tax plans

For his part, when Obama discusses his opponent's plan, he often emphasizes that the biggest beneficiaries of McCain's tax cuts will be those in the higher income brackets and that the effect on the budget as a whole is still uncertain.

"Every independent observer who's looked at John McCain's plan says that his plan would add 200 to 300 billion dollars a year in deficit spending," Obama said this week when asked about McCain's promise to balance the budget by 2013. "He hasn't specified how he would bring it down. His own campaign has acknowledged that they don't have specifics."

McCain's recent promise to balance the budget came as part of his new Jobs for America plan, which was rolled out last week. According to his Web site, as part of "reforming Washington to regain the trust of taxpayers," McCain "will balance the budget by the end of his first term."

When asked about this ambitious goal in a telephone town hall with Virginia voters, McCain said that he plans to accomplish it "by restraining spending, having taxes cut, increasing revenues and eliminating not only the pork-barrel spending by Congress but the parts of government that have become obsolete and yet we are still spending enormous amounts of money on."

Obama called this factually inaccurate last week: "Every time that he's been asked about specific spending cuts -- for example, the $2 billion required for the restoration of Everglades in Florida -- he'll say, 'Well, I don't have a problem with that particular bit of spending. I just don't like the earmarks process it went through.' Well, if that's the case, then it's not a real cut and the truth is there are only about $18 billion worth of earmarks.

This is an oversimplification of McCain's argument. Although many of the specific spending cuts in McCain's plan remain unidentified, his approach to fiscal restraint goes far beyond earmarks alone. McCain has proposed a freeze on the federal government's discretionary spending to allow for a thorough review of all spending programs and an evaluation of areas where spending could be cut.

Voters who listen only to the candidates themselves might believe that Obama will raise taxes on everyone in America and McCain will sink the country into irreparable debt. While there are kernels of truth in each candidates' attack, neither offers an accurate representation of the facts.

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