Month: July 2008

by hilzoy

Last week, I wrote about a Tax Policy Center report that found that there’s a big difference between the tax policies John McCain says he’d enact in his speeches and the ones his campaign describes. A $2.8 trillion difference. To put that in perspective, the extra $2.8 trillion McCain promises to cut in his speeches is equal to the entire cost of Barack Obama’s tax policies as stated by his campaign, using the least favorable scoring method; it’s several hundred million greater than the entire cost of the proposals Obama describes in his speeches.

Slate asked the campaign about this. Here’s the response:

“Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s chief economic adviser, says the numbers he provided to the TPC aren’t secret—they’re the same ones he provides to anyone who asks. He also disputes the way the study takes suggestions McCain has made on the stump out of context. “This is parsing words out of campaign appearances to an unreasonable degree,” Holtz-Eakin said. “He has certainly I’m sure said things in town halls” that don’t jibe perfectly with his written plan. But that doesn’t mean it’s official.“

Ah. I see. A citizen at a town hall meeting asks John McCain a question, expecting to get, well, an answer. John McCain gives one. The citizen, naively, believes that John McCain knows what his own policies are, and that when he says something, it’s “official”. According to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, that citizen is wrong. You can’t find out what McCain’s policies are by asking him and believing his answer. You have to — well, do what? Check the website? Become one of those experts to whom the actual, official details of McCain’s tax policies are disclosed?

That’s some straight talk, my friend.

Some enterprising reporter should ask McCain about this. Offhand, I can think of only three real explanations:

(a) The normal case: Holtz-Eakin has said that he, not John McCain, gets to say what John McCain’s economic policy is, without any backstory. He’s just saying: “don’t listen to him; listen to me.” In that case, I would expect Holtz-Eakin to be fired.

(b) McCain and Holtz-Eakin are making a calculated attempt to deceive. McCain says one thing in public, Holtz-Eakin quietly backtracks to experts; as a result, Holtz-Eakin gets to protest when anyone tries to cost out what McCain actually says, or to point out that it blows a hole in the federal budget. In this case, reporters need to call this attempted bluff.

(c) What Holtz-Eakin says is basically accurate. McCain doesn’t know enough about economic policy. He has therefore outsourced his economic plan to people like Holtz-Eakin. So far, so normal. But in a normal campaign, the economic policy people go over various ideas with the candidate, the candidate chooses among them, and then that is the “official” position, which both the candidate and the campaign know about and try to defend. In this case, the economic policy advisors have gone over different ideas, McCain (let’s imagine) wants to do the various things he’s talked about on the campaign trail, his advisors say: no, that would blow a huge gaping hole in the budget, McCain agrees to a less costly policy, but that fact somehow doesn’t take hold in his mind, and when he goes back on the stump, he reverts to his old ideas.

This scenario raises serious questions about McCain’s fitness to be President. A President needs to be able to make commitments and stick to them. He needs to know what he has previously agreed to. If McCain cannot do that, that’s very serious.

Personally, I suspect that (c) is most accurate. But whatever the truth is, we need to find out who actually speaks for John McCain.

A few more wonky details about Holtz-Eakins’ response to the report below the fold.

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by publius

Dramatic irony

In drama, the device of giving the spectator an item of information that at least one of the characters in the narrative is unaware of[.]

Not much left to add about Obama’s Berlin speech, so I’ll just go all MoDo on you and make lazy uninformed aesthetic observations. In watching the video, I kept thinking back to Ezra Klein’s much-maligned description of Obama’s best speeches:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it.

Klein caught a lot of crap for using this gushing language, but there’s something to the underlying idea. If I could rephrase, I think what he was trying to say is that Obama’s speeches sometimes cause you to become suddenly (though fleetingly) aware of dramatic irony around you. That probably sounds pretty stupid, so let me explain what I mean.

The interesting part about dramatic irony is that the audience knows something the characters don’t. Because the audience knows more, the characters’ actions often resonate with the viewer in interesting ways. For instance, in the John Adams HBO series, the early friendship of Adams and Jefferson has a bittersweet tragic undertone even at its warmest moments because we the audience know what eventually happens. They the characters don’t.

Personally, I feel these same “undertones” when I watch old clips of presidential candidates before they won. For instance, when you see Bill Clinton stand up at the 1992 debate and ask the man how the economy has hurt him, that moment has its own historical undertones. That’s because we the audience know what eventually happened – Clinton won. And he won because he was more in touch with people’s economic troubles. This moment, then, symbolized the broader history.

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by hilzoy

Last month, the Center for Tax Policy put out a report (pdf) on McCain and Obama’s tax proposals. At the time, I noted that some of the assumptions they made about McCain’s policies, which they got from the McCain campaign, did not match what McCain was himself was saying in campaign appearances. Now they’ve come out with a revised version, in which they refine their original calculations, but also note discrepancies between what both candidates’ campaigns say and what the candidates themselves say, and try to cost out both.

The short version: over ten years, the proposals McCain actually makes on the stump would cost $2.7 trillion more than the policies his campaign describes, for a total cost of nearly $7 trillion over ten years. Over the same ten years, the proposals Obama makes on the stump would cost $367 billion less than the policies his campaign describes, for a total cost of a little under $2.5 trillion. (The main difference between what Obama says on the stump and what his campaign describes is his proposal to levy Social Security taxes on income over $250,000/year.)

Here’s a chart showing the effects of both candidates’ tax proposals (the ones they describe on the stump) on people in various income brackets, from p. 46 of the report. Note that while this graph shows taxes going up for people in the top quintile under Obama’s plan, a more detailed breakdown (p. 45) shows that taxes only go up for the top 5% (incomes over $226,918/year.) People in the 95th-99th percentiles ($226,918-$603,402/year) would pay $799 more a year, on average.

Just something to keep in mind the next time you hear John McCain say: “Senator Obama wants to raise taxes; I want to keep them low. Somebody who wants higher taxes, I’m not your candidate. Senator Obama is.”

A longer excerpt from the report below the fold.

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