How to pay for the presidential candidates' proposals?

It's going to take a lot of this.

Featured Topic | Posted 38 weeks 4 days ago

How to pay for the presidential candidates' proposals?

Barack Obama promises $4,000 credits to help pay college tuition. Hillary Rodham Clinton backs $25 billion for home heating subsidies. And John McCain wants to not only extend President Bush's tax cuts, but eliminate the alternative minimum tax at a cost of about $2 trillion over 10 years.

Can America afford what the candidates are pitching?

Ben likes: Who pays the bill?

Ed Morrissey/Captain's Quarters

USA Today took a look at the actual economic policies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and especially at the bottom line. They wonder who will pay the bill for the latest Democratic Party giveaway. The real answer: the taxpayers. Both candidates essentially offer the same discredited statist solutions that now burdens Europe. Neither have honestly addressed the costs to taxpayers, nor how it will add to both the deficit spending and the federal intrusion into markets that do better at producing results.

Joel likes: Ignoring the budget crisis

Kevin G. Hall and Margaret Talev/McClatchy Newspapers

Both are counting on savings from reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq and rolling back some of President Bush's tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire after 2010, to pay for their new programs. Both expect that expanded use of electronic health records and other advances in medical information technology will defray some of the cost of moving to a universal health-care system.

Neither, however, has proposed a fix for the biggest near-term strain on the federal budget, the alternative minimum tax, or explained how they propose to balance the cost of their campaign promises with the looming expense of the aging baby boomers.