Two People Who Do Not Speak for John McCain: Phil Gramm. John McCain

John McCain says that his closest economic advisor--Phil Gramm--does not speak for John McCain:

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive - McCain: ‘Phil Gramm does not speak for me’ « - Blogs from CNN.com: John McCain forcefully repudiated comments by his national campaign co-chair Phil Gramm Thursday, telling reporters, "Phil Gramm does not speak for me..."

Douglas Holtz-Eakin says that John McCain does not speak for John McCain either:

Think Progress » Holtz-Eakin: On Wednesday, the Tax Policy Center released a report finding a $2.8 trillion gap between Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) public economic proposals and his advisers’ private assurances.... Douglas Holtz-Eakin... disputes the way the [TPC] 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...

Think Progress's Wonk Room:

Wonk Room: For months, the McCain campaign had not offered specific numbers on his profligate budget proposals. In June, Robert Bixby of the Concord Coalition, a prominent advocacy group for balanced budgets, told Bloomberg news: “I haven’t received anything, and if some of the other groups have then I’ll be really ticked off.... If he’s got some more complete budget proposal he can send I’d love to get it.”

Detailed figures did finally appear publicly in the first Tax Policy Center report and later in the Washington Post, but are still not available on the campaign’s web site. And no wonder: there are still serious inconsistencies between what his advisers provide to the wonks at the Tax Policy Center (and the editorial board of the Washington Post) and what appears on McCain’s web site and in his stump speeches....

Two examples of McCain’s inconsistencies....

The Alternative Minimum Tax: McCain told the Conservative Political Action Conference that he would “abolish” the Alternative Minimum Tax. His website says he would “phase it out.” But the numbers he offered Tax Policy Center suggest that he would only “extend and index” the patch and “raise the exemption.” The difference between “abolishing” and “raising the exemption”? $390 billion.

Corporate Expensing: Senator McCain has called for a huge change in the tax code allowing businesses to write-off their equipment purchases. In the documents his advisers provide to tax experts, the proposal is restricted to “a narrow class of investments [with] a sunset the proposal after five years.” But on the stump, as the Tax Policy Center points out, McCain’s statements “strongly imply that the provision would apply to all machinery and equipment.” And McCain regularly rails against sunset provisions as covert tax-hikes. The difference between these two corporate expensing proposals? $737 billion, enough money to fight another Iraq war.

Comments

[howard]

so it's clear, prof: holtz-eakins is going to swallow his pride for the chance to be up close and personal to (potential) power.

now, are you going to treat him like mankiw - still a member of the guild - or are you going to take your approach to journalism and apply it to your profession.

after all, when i see holtz-eakins make bs excuses for the man signing his paycheck, i ask "why oh why can't we have a better economics profession."

[Robert Waldmann]

So what do you think of expensing all investment in machinery and equipment?

No need to answer in public.

[How big a hike in the upper-bracket income tax, and in the gift and estate tax do I get in return? I'm happy to go for it as part of a package *if* it comes with the appropriate social-insurance goodies. Not otherwise.]

[Robert Waldmann]

To me, the most outrageous Holtz-Eakinism was claiming that McCain's proposal to allow taxpayers to decide whether to pay according to an alternative simpler tax would be designed so as to be revenue neutral.

This is an alternative maximum tax. Clearly it is not simpler to calculate taxes two ways instead of one. Also clearly relatively few people will pay the optional alternative tax if they owe more that way than with the plain old tax code. The proposal implies a huge tax cut for the rich (of course). There is no way to give people a choice that is revenue neutral (unless as the TPC noted one choice is so horrible no one chooses it).

[Remember: Doug Holtz-Eakin was brave, and used his powers for good when he was chief economist for Glenn Hubbard and worked for George W. Bush. And Doug Holtz-Eakin was brave, and used his powers for good when he was head of CBO and worked for the likes of Trent Lott and what's-his-name from Illinois... Hastert.

[howard]

prof, this is why we mark-to-market; holtz-eakin may once have traded at par, but now he's a distressed asset. past performance is no guarantee of future results.

[derrida derider]

"I had another idea about smart cost sharing. Make the doctors pay for the care and pay the doctors based on outcomes ..."
Ummm, that's exactly what many of the more successful overseas health systems do. It's hardly a new idea.

I can't understand why US health reformers are always trying to reinvent the wheel - there is a vast amount of international experience, good and bad, to learn from.

[derrida derider]

Whoops, wrong thread.