McCain’s Fuzzy Math

Today's Washington Post points out that John McCain's budget plan doesn't add up:

SEN. JOHN McCain says that President McCain would balance the federal budget by 2013. The plan is not credible.

The Congressional Budget Office projects a deficit of $443 billion in 2013 if President Bush's tax cuts are extended, as Mr. McCain wants, and the alternative minimum tax is merely patched to make certain it does not hit growing numbers of taxpayers. But Mr. McCain is proposing far more tax cuts. The only way he avoids having them add hundreds of billions more to the deficit in 2013 is by phasing them in and adding other caveats. Mr. McCain says on the campaign trail that he would repeal, rather than merely adjust, the alternative minimum tax, slash the corporate tax rate, now 35 percent, to 25 percent, and double the exemption for dependents. It turns out that none of that would be fully implemented by the end of the first McCain term. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates the extra cost of the scaled-back plan at $47 billion in 2013, bringing the deficit to a daunting $490 billion. Sen. Barack Obama's campaign claims it would be far higher, somewhere between $650 billion and $750 billion.

...Mr. McCain sells American voters short -- and he does himself a disservice -- with his implausible claim.