Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Fuzzy Math

EDIT:Where I used the word "rebate" I should have used the word "credit". This doesn't really change the math at all. It means the government would take in 980 billion fewer dollars in taxes (out of 2.66 trillion in revenue).

My dad thought it was ridiculous that people were repeating McCain's $5 Million line, and taking it out of context, so I decided to watch the original interview.
In the original interview, McCain said that he wants to give each family a $7,000 tax rebate per child, and wants to give each family a $5,000 tax rebate to spend on health care. That sounded like a lot of money to me, so I checked the census and did some quick math. These measures would cost about 980 BILLION dollars. Definitely a lot of money, but without knowing how much the budget is, that number still didn't mean a whole lot, so I checked into the budget a bit, and the total estimated receipts for 2008 are 2.66 Trillion. Bush couldn't manage to balance the budget without McCain's proposed measures, so how is McCain going to find another trillion dollars to give away?


Watching Lieberman's speech, and he had a long section about "If McCain were just a typical Republican, he never would have..." and listed a bunch of the better things that McCain has helped accomplish by working with Democrats in Congress. Sounds to me like a slam on the Republicans, but boy did I get a lot of applause...did I miss something?