Deception From All

A Washington Times editorial adds to yesterday's post. The candidates have been particularly vague in describing how they will pay for their promises.

First, the Democratic presidential candidates plan to roll back part of the Bush tax cuts to finance their campaign proposals such as health care, green energy initiatives, etc. However, the Congressional Democrats are already relying upon this revenue to balance the budget by 2013. This essentially means the additional revenue is being counted twice. Clinton and Obama are both Senators and have to be familiar with the Democrat's budgetary proposals. When they campaign and state they will pay for their new polices with revenue that's already been committed, it's deceptive.

Similarly, John McCain has offered pork as a way to pay for some of his tax proposals. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) counted 11,737 earmarks worth roughly $17 billion for Fiscal Year 2008. However, McCain has often cited an earmark figure of $60 billion because he believes that any initiative traced back to initial funding from an earmark can be removed. Two points of concern with this. First, his estimate is overly optimistic because he trying to use this $60 billion is savings to offset the one-year AMT patch. His rhetoric on earmarks and pork barrel spending leads on to believe that that's where all the government's money is being spent. In reality, less than 1% of all the government's outlays are "earmarks." Secondly, it's hard to imagine this money would simply disappear. Specified earmarks may be cut out, but that money could theoretically be added to the overall budgets of government departments or elsewhere. It would have little affect on the government's overall baseline. This allows Congressional conference chairs to cut deals with bureaucratic leaders so that their departments receive extra money in exchange for tacit agreement of spending on a specified project or region. As it was once explained to me: would you rather have your elected representative deciding how to best spend your money or some appointed bureaucrat?