Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Who Will Pay?

I have been ranting about this for months. Of course you already know the answer to this question don't you? Hmmm? Don't you?

While it's hard to come up with a precise price tag given the lack of specifics in many of their proposals, these plans are likely to cost the Treasury well into the hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The National Taxpayers Union, a conservative group that favors lower taxes and smaller government, gives a very rough estimate of $287 billion for Obama and $218 billion for Clinton.
How would the candidates pay for all these new programs without driving the deficit to new heights? Some have specific funding sources; some don't. The candidates rather vaguely claim that costs would be covered primarily by repealing President Bush's tax cuts and ending the Iraq war.
This is where the math gets fuzzy.