The New York Times looks at the economic plans / proposals of the three leading candidates (John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton). The conclusion: ‘The Republican and Democratic presidential candidates differ strikingly in their approaches to taxes and spending, but their fiscal plans have at least one thing in common: each could significantly swell the budget deficit and increase the national debt by trillions of dollars, according to tax and budget experts.’

 The reasons reflect the ideological leanings of the candidates, with Senator John McCain proposing tax cuts that go beyond President Bush’s and the Democrats advocating programs costing hundreds of billions of dollars. But for fiscal experts concerned with the deficit, both approaches are worrisome.

With the national debt soaring to $9.1 trillion from $5.6 trillion at the start of 2001, in part because of the Iraq war and Mr. Bush’s tax cuts, a crucial question about the candidates to succeed him is “whether they are helping to fill the hole or make it deeper,” said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan organization that advocates deficit reduction. “With the proposals they have on the table, it looks to me like all three would make it deeper.”

Of course, the three candidates aren’t happy with the assessment, but if you shouldn’t trust one (or three in this case) person when it comes to policy proposals and its effects, its the person who does the proposal. Yes, this assessment could be wrong, more research would be handy, but the independent experts get the benefit of the doubt. Not the campaigns.

And, it has to be said, that the article should worry lots of Americans, especially readers of this blog, most of whom are centrist or even conservative when it comes to economic policies. With that I mean, that many readers of this blog seem to believe - like I do - that responsible economic policies are of immense importance.

According to the experts cited in the NYT article, none of the three candidates are economically responsible, however.

Mr. McCain’s plan would appear to result in the biggest jump in the deficit, independent analyses based on Congressional Budget Office figures suggest. A calculation done by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington found that his tax and budget plans, if enacted as proposed, would add at least $5.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Fiscal monitors say it is harder to compute the effect of the Democratic candidates’ measures because they are more intricate. They estimate that, even taking into account that there are some differences between the proposals by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the impact of either on the deficit would be less than one-third that of the McCain plan.

The centerpiece of Mr. McCain’s economic plan is a series of tax cuts that would largely benefit corporations and the wealthy. He is calling for cutting corporate taxes by $100 billion a year. Eliminating the alternative minimum tax, which was created to apply to wealthy taxpayers but now also affects some in the middle class, would reduce revenues by $60 billion annually. He also would double the exemption that can be claimed for dependents, which would cost the government $65 billion.

It’s unbelievable, but it seems that - once again - the Republican is the most irresponsible candidate of the three. Obama’s and Clinton’s plans are, obviously, problematic, but compared to McCain’s (and from a deficit perspective) they’re heavenly.

Of course:

Some conservative economists say that increased deficits in the short run are an acceptable tradeoff for tax cuts that they say will promote economic growth in the long run. And many liberal economists say that some of the Democratic spending proposals, like addressing the affordability of health care or improving education, are long-overdue investments that pay off handsomely even if they entail more red ink.

To me, the first reasoning has more validity to it than the second one, but one has to wonder when they will stop passing the buck. Future generations will have to pay off debts - the deficit will be their problem. Your children will be the ones forced to suffer because of the deficit created by you. That’s something to keep in mind, isn’t it?

And since when is it conservative to cut taxes, while letting the deficit grow? That has never been a conservative approach.

After having spend a page looking at what’s wrong with McCain’s plan, the NYT explains some of the things wrong with the progressive economic plans; sure, they would result in a less big deficit than the Republican plans, but:

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have acknowledged that their various new programs would be costly but have outlined how to pay for them. But some fiscal monitors say they may be relying on overly rosy projections of how much savings their proposals would actually yield.

O, and they would significantly increase the size of the government, which isn’t exactly something to be ignored either.

Mrs. Clinton has calculated that her universal health care plan would cost about $110 billion a year, while Mr. Obama’s somewhat more modest proposal would cost up to $65 billion annually, his advisers say. Both candidates have also talked of new government incentives and investment to encourage the development of alternative sources of energy, which would cost about $15 billion a year.

The Democratic candidates have suggested that they could finance these and other programs by allowing parts of the Bush tax cuts to expire. That, however, ignores projections of the Congressional Budget Office, which has already assigned those savings to deficit reduction…

But they would retain those reductions meant to benefit poor and “middle-class” families, which they defined as the 97 percent or so of the population that lives on less than $250,000 a year, and they would count the estimated $50 billion generated by higher taxes on the wealthy as new revenue.

“Remember, you can only use this money once,” said Mr. Bixby of the Concord Coalition, “and with all the Bush tax cuts scheduled to expire, that money is already scheduled to come into the Treasury. But on the campaign trail, this has become a source of new spending.”

On the spending side, Mr. Obama has argued that ending the Iraq war is one way to pay for some of the new programs, including creating a national infrastructure investment bank and increasing the foreign aid budget. But such savings, which Mrs. Clinton does not count on, would not immediately make their way into the Treasury, and some experts say it is not clear whether they would be sufficient to finance all the programs Mr. Obama has enumerated.

Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center also reacted to the promise of the Democratic candidates (no new taxes for the middle class): hearing such a promise “makes you very sad.” “First of all, we don’t have enough revenue coming in to pay our bills.” In addition the notion that all the revenue that would be lost in a middle-class tax freeze can be made up by higher taxes on the wealthy “is not tenable.”

Read it and weep.