Do you trust factcheck.org? That' s one of many sources cited in the article McCain’s claims that Obama will raise taxes are wrong.
It’s misleading to tag Obama for something that was built in to the Bush tax cuts. Remember that they are set to auto-expire - that's the law Bush signed.
Senator McCain has announced that he would balance the budget by 2013.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the unified budget deficit will be $443 billion in 2013 assuming that expiring tax cuts are extended. To balance the budget in that year John McCain would have to pay for all of his campaign proposals plus cut another $443 billion of spending. To give a sense of why this pledge is not credible, cutting spending by $443 billion would require:
- Cutting Medicare by 81 percent OR
- Cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid by 33 percent OR
- Cutting non-defense discretionary spending – which pays for education, veterans, air traffic control and justice – by 79 percent
And these spending cuts would be on top of the hundreds of billions of dollars of spending cuts Senator McCain needs to pay for his existing proposals including: increasing defense spending, cutting corporate taxes, eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), and a small tax cut for middle class families with children (a total of $125 for middle class families with 2 children and $0 for 101 million households who do not qualify). The New York Times has estimated that Senator McCain’s budget plan “will add $200 billion to $300 billion or, depending on his voluntary tax system, even more” annually to the deficit.
Without these offsets and spending cuts, the McCain budget would leave a deficit of at least $650 billion to $750 billion in 2013 alone. No wonder so many Republicans are now reporting that they’ll vote for Barack Obama in November.
