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?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The $7000 is a tax exemption not a tax rebate, The current tax exemption is $3500 per child and is not indexed for inflation. This has resulted in a effective tax increase on families each year. If this tax exemption had been indexed for inflation it would currently be upwards of $15,000. The $5000 health Care credit is a tax credit (not a rebate)to help those without health care be able to afford it

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Anonymous said...

Try again, unless our current tax rate is at 100% your math doesn't work. The $7000 tax exemption (which would replace the current $3500 exemption) reduces the income you pay tax on, it is not a tax credit. This increase in the child tax exemption would only reduce the tax collected from the "middle class". Upper income families lose the exemption when their income goes over $239,950, and most low income families do not have any federal income tax liabilities because of the current exemption.

Steve said...

Dear Anonymous,
John McCain said "tax credit" not "tax exemption". I would hope that someone running for president would understand the difference.