Not really. Like I said, pretense of objectivity; it's the oldest and thinnest pundit shtick in the book. Lately it goes by its new name of "concern trolling".

Everybody knows that Raoul Duke was the only objective observer who ever lived. Other journalists talked about objectivity; he grabbed it by the f***ing throat.

The other day I heard that ignorance and apathy are sweeping the country. I didn't know that, but I don't really care.

"All power to the people" was used at least as early as 1921, in a Menshevik pamphlet in favor of the Kronstadt rebels and, ironically, against the Bolsheviks. And I dare say that probably wasn't the first time.

The ultimate result of shielding man from the effects of folly is to people the world with fools. -Herbert Spencer

in addition, gov't provided health care is likely to be nontrivially cheaper than privately provided health care for the same level of service. Sad, but true.

Both candidates are going to raise your taxes. Both will have to in order to avoid a downgrading of Federal debt. One of them is reasonably honest about it, and the other is not.

It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.

Again, I agree that whether or not a given tax has been increased is a matter of whether or not the rate(s) for that tax have gone up, not whether or not they have gone up relative to some baseline that presumes an increase per current law (if that's the difference to which you are referring). So I agree with you on the semantics.

As for your second point, if increased revenues were likely to cause a commensurate increase in spending, deficits would not go down and your point would be valid. But I don't think that premise is valid. Spending might be higher, but not so much higher as to wipe out the deficit reduction achieved through the increased revenues.

The flip-side of essentially the same argument is the "starve the beast" argument -- that reducing revenues by cutting taxes will cause such a great decrease in spending as to avoid increasing deficits*. To the best of my knowledge, it is generally believed that this does not occur.

On the "starve the beast" theory, there is debate among economists and the jury is out among them on whether or not lower taxes induce lower spending at all. It may seem intuitive that lower revenues would induce lower spending, but an intuitive argument is made the other way as well -- that borrowing to spend rather than taxing to spend shields taxpayers from the pain of spending and reduces the incentive to curb spending. In addition to this intuitive aspect, the empirical evidence is debated.

A debate emerged among some economists after this (2004) piece ( http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v26n2/cpr-26n2-2.pdf ) by William A. Niskanen, Chairman of the Cato Institute and former member and acting chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the (famously free-market) University of Chicago, which has honored him with a lifetime professional service award. Niskanen concluded that tax cuts led to HIGHER, not lower spending.

Conservative economist Gregory Mankiw, who was Chairman of W Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors and is an economics professor at Harvard, noted (in 2006) that another prominent economist reached the opposite conclusion, with some differences in methodology (with perhaps some advantages), albeit with less recent data vs. Niskanen's analysis. Mankiw also notes that (activist “progressive” economist and blogger) Mark Thoma was very critical of Niskanen’s methodology http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/05/a_closer_look_a.html. Mankiw concluded that “Until someone sorts out these apparently conflicting results, it is (as Thoma suggests) premature for anyone…to conclude that Niskanen has the last, or even the most persuasive, word on the topic.” http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/06/starving-beast.html.

More recently, economists Christina and David Romer analyzed the question and found that (quoting the abstract of their paper) “The results provide no support for the hypothesis that tax cuts restrain government spending; indeed, they suggest that tax cuts may actually increase spending. The results also indicate that the main effect of tax cuts on the government budget is to induce subsequent legislated tax increases.” http://www.nber.org/papers/w13548 The Romers are economic advisors to Obama, although conclusions they have reached in their studies have been cited by conservatives advocating tax cuts (on the basis of GDP growth), and The Economist magazine described them (5/10/07) as having “impeccable neoclassical [economist] credentials” (meaning strongly favoring free markets as a means of efficient allocation of resources). http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9163589.

Discussion of the Romer study at http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2007/04/new_estimates_o.html and http://streetlightblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/macroeconomic-effects-of-tax-changes.html

My personal sense is that "starve the beast" may work to some extent, but even if so, it doesn't work nearly well enough to assume that lower taxes today will lead to sufficiently lower spending tomorrow.

* By the way, the key metric to keep our eyes on is the ratio of publicly-held debt-to-GDP (current and projected), not deficits or even debt in absolute terms.

how'd that work out?

My explanation isn't sophisticated at all, pseudo- or otherwise. Just don't try to tell me that an attorney doesn't understand the truth behind it. Unless you're one of those people who believes that debt never has to get paid off.

I blame it all on the Internet

Under Obama the deficit would definitely be lower.

Of course not!

But obviously the McCain campaign's angle is on 'reforming' the 'mess'.

The maverick angle is their only in -- McCain + his party have no regulatory bona fides.

It's pretty much their only play.