Even though questions about spending and tax priorities and "too much debt" were asked again at Tuesday night's presidential debate, John McCain and Barack Obama once again failed to answer them.
In fact, they both perpetuated the fantasy that they can keep all their policy proposals intact -- and add new ones -- and pay for them with fuzzy spending cuts.
"We obviously have to stop this spending spree that's going on in Washington," McCain said. "Do you know that we've laid a $10 trillion debt on these young Americans who are here with us tonight, $100 billion of it we owe to China?"
A sentence or two later, he proposed a new $300 billion program to buy up distressed home mortgages. "Is it expensive? Yes," he said, but it's necessary to stabilize home values.
He did not even hint at how he'd pay for the program -- or his tax cuts that may cost $450 billion a year -- except to say he'd freeze some domestic spending for one year and eliminate earmarks, which cost $18 billion a year.
Then Obama attacked President Bush for increasing the national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion, but he asserted that he would be able to cut taxes for 95 percent
of Americans, expand health care and make college affordable -- "but I'm actually cutting more than I'm spending, so that it will be a net spending cut," he said.
Yet no budget watchdog group in town estimates that either McCain or Obama was going to contain the deficit even before the current economic crisis -- which is creating revenue losses and increased outlays that could add $1 trillion to the national debt this year alone.
Prior to the crisis, McCain was promising to balance the federal budget by 2013, but the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that, at best, he'd rack up a deficit of $147 billion.
The committee estimated McCain's proposed tax cuts to cost $417 billion to $485 billion that year -- based on his campaign's own estimates -- but another group, the Brookings Institution-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center, said they could cost $700 billion, based on McCain's statements in stump speeches.
Meantime, while McCain claims that his health care reforms would be "budget-neutral," the Tax Policy Center estimates that they'd cost $1.3 trillion over 10 years and only "modestly trim the number of the uninsured."
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