Telling the Big Lie

I'm shocked, shocked (well, not that shocked) to find that Sen. McCain has been lying about his tax proposals as well as Sen. Obama's tax plans. Unsurprisingly, Sen. McCain's unwillingness to raise taxes while seriously cutting spending is a bit of a lark, as Joe Klein writes. Speaking through Michael Scherer and Matt Miller is Sen. McCain's economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who admits that the basic math of the federal budget will require any president to raise taxes in the future or face bankrupting the U.S. government. The natural growth of the federal budget, Holtz-Eakin claims, will require an overall tax increase of some seven percent by 2020 to keep up with budget inflation. And it's not surprising that such an increase of the federal budget will happen since we have a military to rebuild along with our ever increasing interest on federal debt.
So what we have here is an instance, as Holtz-Eakin describes, of the math being at odds with Sen. McCain's campaign slogans. Perhaps Sen. McCain simple hasn't been told this yet or perhaps he just doesn't care. His apparent willingness to blatently lie during this election makes the latter far more likely. Klein finishes off with the mention that Holtz-Eakin acknowledges that Sen. Obama's tax plan would actually reduce net taxes over a ten year period. How that will square with the programs Sen. Obama proposes I'm not sure. But at least people within the McCain camp realize that the sloganeering is a lot of empty rhetoric.