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The Difference on Health Care
Matthew Yglesias — Paul Krugman points to a valuable chart from the Urban/Brookings Tax Policy Center comparing estimated impacts of the McCain and Obama health care plans. Much more informative than your average newspaper article. ...

McCain, Obama Tax War Sparked With New Ads (VIDEO)
The Huffington Post | Full News Feed — Early on Wednesday morning, both Barack Obama and John McCain released ads focused on taxes. If the tone of both spots proved predictable, the amount of money being pushed into each campaign's ad was not. Though McCain has outspent Obama on paid media in battleground states so far this month, Obama's new television ad will start getting pumped into several key states today -- specifically, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Virginia. By contrast, McCain's new piece is a radio ad, and his campaign has declined to reveal exactly how hard or in what parts of the country it will be ...

Chutzpah, Thy Name is John McCain
The Anonymous Liberal — John McCain put a new ad out today attacking Barack Obama on taxes. It begins with a narrator intoning: “Celebrities don’t have to worry about family budgets, but we sure do.” We? Really? This coming from a guy who, just the day before, couldn't remember how many houses he owned. Maybe he's referring to his budget for household servants, "which went from 184,000 in 2006 to $273,000 in 2007, according to John McCain’s tax returns." And of course it wouldn't be a Republican ad if it didn't end with a massive lie. The narrator says "Obama's ready to raise your taxes, but is he ready to lead?" According to ...

links for 2008-08-24
J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles — ... Roberton Williams and Howard Gleckman: An Updated Analysis of the 2008 Presidential Candidates' Tax Plans: Executive Summary - August 18, 2008 ...

Factchecking Palin
Obsidian Wings — by hilzoy I thought Palin's speech was quite good: well-written, well delivered. And, as I said earlier, I think she's a genuinely engaging person, and comes across very well. There were just a couple of problems. One, which I have seen people notice, but which I suspect won't be a big deal for a lot of voters, is that it had very ...

Factchecking Palin
Political Animal — Factchecking Palin I thought Palin's speech was quite good: well-written, well delivered. And, as I said earlier, I think she's a genuinely engaging person, and comes across very well. There were just a couple of problems. One, which I have seen people notice, but which I suspect won't be a big deal for a lot of voters, is that it had very little substance. The other, which the commenters I saw on TV for some reason neglected to mention, was that she told a lot of lies. A few that stood out for me, or that I spotted in my quick run-through of some blogs: * "To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For ...

Watch What They Do, Not What They Say
Obsidian Wings — by hilzoy That was a rather listless speech by Senator McCain, though it picked up briefly at the end. I wanted to note a couple of things. First, McCain often distorted Obama's views. He said Obama would raise taxes, when (just to repeat myself) Obama will raise taxes only on people making over $250,000 a year. Still, ...

Watch What They Do, Not What They Say
Political Animal — Watch What They Do, Not What They Say That was a rather listless speech by Senator McCain, though it picked up briefly at the end. I wanted to note a couple of things. First, McCain often distorted Obama's views. He said Obama would raise taxes, when (just to repeat myself) Obama will raise taxes only on people making over $250,000 a year. Still, in that case, you can imagine a way in which you might make what he said out to be true, if you squint a bit: Obama will raise some taxes. But there's no way to make this out to be anything but a lie:: "His plan will force small businesses to cut jobs, reduce wages, and force families ...

Taxes Are the Price We Pay for Civilization Joe Biden
Hit & Run — Call off the search-and-rescue teams! Democratic vice presidential Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), last seen having a Bette Davis as Baby Jane moment with a wheelchair-bound political supporter and questioning the wisdom of his even being on the ticket (Hillary Clinton, he told a rally, "might have been a better pick than me"), has surfaced again. This time, the Delaware destroyer is telling rich folks that paying taxes is patriotic: "We want to take money and put it back in the pocket of middle-class people," Biden said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning ...

Jared Bernstein: Guts, Brains, and Health Care Reform
Politics on HuffingtonPost.com — With less than 40 days to go until the presidential election, let's assess where things stand. Obama appears to be building an edge in the polls and has some upward "mo." That said, the election appears to be a lot closer than it should be given this fact: on two of the issues that concern voters the most--the economy and the war--the policies of the Bush administration are widely viewed as dismal failures. Yet McCain's plans are clearly an extension, if not an "amping up," of precisely those policies. There's a third issue of great concern--health care--which should also favor Obama, but it hasn't been discussed much, ...

McCain Slings Right Wing Fairy Tales About Taxes
BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash — AN ONGOING BUZZFLASH SERIES ON THE GOP ECONOMIC WAR AGAINST AMERICAN WORKING FAMILIES by Meg White Here at BuzzFlash, we don't always have money for all the stuff we want. Included in that unfulfilled wish list is an economic expert. So we've had to rely on outside experts to cut through all the talk on taxes lately. One thing seems to ring true no matter where you go for information: Under a McCain Administration, the GOP war on American working families would continue.    As we've noted before ...

Harold Pollack: Cutting Medicare and Medicaid to fund regressive tax cuts: Haven't we heard this before?
Politics on HuffingtonPost.com — Are you baffled by Team McCain's behavior in recent weeks? I certainly am. I'm not talking about the candidate himself. His irresponsible selection of Governor Palin and his bailout grandstanding reduced the prospects for surprise. I mean the adults around him, people I had presumed might know better. What's the deal with them? One moment, a key advisor is telling reporters--telling reporters!--"We are looking forward to turning a page on this financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr. Obama's aggressively liberal record and how he will be too risky for Americans." Another says--on the record--"If we keep talking about the ...

Harold Pollack: A 1983 faux pas by Cindy McCain, a Sunday morning bromide by Rep. Roy Blunt, and what Republicans still don't get about helping people
Politics on HuffingtonPost.com — This year, I've been writing a lot about cognitive disability and about health reform. It goes with the territory that I come into contact with many people, usually mothers and sisters, caring for loved ones. Some of their missives are heartrending. Many express simmering anger about schools, medical and social service systems that fail to provide needed help. Some time ago, I met Nancy Skiver, a lovely woman who overcame many obstacles to raise her son Danny in a difficult time. She has been a strong advocate for children and adults living with disabilities. Ms. Skiver told me about the 1983 annual meeting of the Arizona Association for ...

McCain: ‘I Don’t Know’ If Obama’s Policies Amount To Communism
Think Progress — Last July, when asked if Barack Obama is a socialist, John McCain replied, “I don’t know.” But now McCain seems to be fairly certain Obama is a socialist. After all, his campaign has spent the past couple weeks trying to scare Americans into believing that Obama’s economic policies amount to socialism. Yesterday during an interview with a local Miami CBS affiliate, McCain took his skepticism of Obama’s political and economic philosophies further, expressing uncertainty as to whether Obama is a communist: Q: Florida Senator Mel Martinez talked about Barack ...

McCain: ?I Don?t Know? If Obama?s Policies Amount To Communism
The Hollywood Liberal — McCain: ?I Don?t Know? If Obama?s Policies Amount To Communism Last July, when asked if Barack Obama is a socialist, John McCain replied, “I don’t know.” But now McCain seems to be fairly certain Obama is a socialist. After all, his campaign has spent the past couple weeks trying to scare Americans into believing that Obama’s economic policies amount to socialism. Yesterday during an interview […] Last July, when asked if Barack Obama is a socialist, John McCain replied, “ I don’t know .” But now McCain seems to be fairly certain Obama is a socialist. After all, his campaign has spent the past couple weeks trying to ...

Realignment And Economics
Open Left - Front Page — I've written a lot about realignment this year.  And in my series "Three Waves and A Wall", I connected the repeated waves of realigning elections with the longer waves of rising and falling world powers.  Here's a chart--a modified version of one I came across yesterday (more aesthetic original here), from Visualizing Economics--that helps show how the two are connected.  A second chart on the flip completes the process. The long, relatively constant climb of income from 1933 to 1973 represents the rise of American power to its peak, when, like others before it, America experienced a rude, ...