Bruce Bartlett, Judges, Taxes May Not Make McCain’s Case (Politico):
Lacking any positive reason to vote for McCain, conservatives have fallen back on [arguing] … that whatever else one thinks about McCain, he will at least be better on two key issues: taxes and judges. After all, Obama is on record saying he will raise taxes on the wealthy. And while McCain may not be able to keep his promise to cut taxes further and still balance the budget, the position of each candidate is indicative of his general philosophy of taxation. In this sense, it is reasonable to assume that taxes will be higher under Obama than under McCain. …
As for taxes, the next president is probably going to raise them regardless of who is elected. That is because our nation’s fiscal problems are becoming too pressing to ignore. … Sooner rather than later, fiscal reality will force action on the budget. And with the political impossibility of cutting spending by enough to matter, especially with Democratic control of Congress, the default position will necessarily be higher taxes.
To be sure, McCain and Obama will raise taxes differently, and that is not unimportant. But the simple idea that Obama will raise taxes and McCain will cut them is nonsense. Every serious budget analyst knows this, even if McCain insists that he can continue all the Bush tax cuts, cut taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars additionally, and still balance the budget. That is impossible.
It’s also worth remembering that McCain has never been a stalwart tax cutter, having opposed the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 on the grounds that they were giveaways to the rich.
Dan Shaviro, Bruce Bartlett on McCain vs. Obama (Start Making Sense):
This is entirely, indeed verging on indisputably, correct if we posit that the next president will follow policies that are not entirely insane. But insanity can prevail for a long time, so I disagree that McCain will raise taxes simply because the fiscal situation makes doing so unavoidable in the long run. …
As for McCain, it’s true that he wasn’t and presumably still isn’t a dyed in the wool tax cutter. I don’t think he actually knows or cares about taxes any more than the average high school student does. And it’s true that he took a more responsible stance in 2001 and 2003. But that was at a time when (a) he was furious at Bush for throwing filth at him in the 2000 presidential campaign and (b) he didn’t see his future as necessarily linked to the ruling powers in the Republican party. Now he is institutionally committed to reckless tax cutting even if it remains a matter of personal indifference to him.
Readers may have noticed that I’ve been criticizing McCain a lot in my blog entries but not saying a whole lot about Obama. This reflects that I’m not necessarily sold to a high degree either on Obama personally (although he appears to be intelligent, and the attacks on him have generally been unfounded and idiotic) or on the institutional commitments of a Democratic nominee. My main reason for supporting him, as one clearly can infer from these columns that I do, is that I fear McCain will be incredibly bad. This basically reflects the institutional commitments that I think McCain has via the Bush-Rove Republican party, plus the fact that he appears to be a dangerous warmonger.
Returning to the tax and budgetary realm, I believe we are headed for the shoals of a fiscal disaster unless the Republicans become sane again, at which point bipartisan solutions may become possible. But they need to lose a few more times before that has any chance of happening. In the short term, McCain like Bush will, I fear, act mainly to make things worse — as Obama might too if political constraints are binding enough (although his advisors know better and he appears to be smart enough to understand what they tell him), but at least in far lesser degree.
