Candidates' deficit plans don't add up

As the government closes the books Sunday with a $1.1 trillion deficit for the year, which required borrowing 32 cents for every dollar it spent, budget analysts have little confidence in either presidential candidate's plan to address the accumulating debt, now at about $16 trillion.

The Republican nominee promises to balance the budget in eight years to 10 years, but he also offers a mix of budgetary contradictions: higher Pentagon spending, restoring cuts that Democrats made in Medicare and an absolute refusal to consider tax increases.

To fulfill his promise, Romney would require cuts to other programs so deep — under one calculation requiring cutting many areas of the domestic budget by one-third within four years — that they could never get through Congress.

In other words, it wouldn't work.

Obama claims more than $4 trillion in deficit savings over the coming decade. But it you peel away accounting tricks and debatable claims on spending cuts, it's more like $1.1 trillion. Republicans say it's even less because of creative bookkeeping used to mask spending on Medicare reimbursements to doctors.

The accounting gets tricky, but the biggest faults with Obama's math are his claims of more than $2 trillion in savings from earlier budget deals with Republicans and an additional $848 billion in savings from winding down of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"You can't find a $4 trillion number," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative who once led the Congressional Budget Office.

Obama promises relatively small cuts of $597 billion from big federal benefit programs such as Medicare and Medicaid over the next decade while proposing tax increases of $1.9 trillion that he couldn't push through Congress when Democrats controlled both the House and Senate.

Obama's performance on the deficit should be his Achilles heel. The deficit has exceeded $1 trillion each year on his watch. He gave a cold shoulder to his own special deficit commission. Whatever efforts have occurred over the past two years to curb the deficit have come under pressure by Republicans.

Portion from another article:

"You have to have large cuts in the rest of the non-defense budget, very large cuts," said Paul Van De Water, an analyst at the budget think tank. "Whether it's politically and practically achievable is subject to question."

Romney also is light on details on his tax cut proposal.

He says he wants to cut rates by 20 percent, but won't specify how he'll find the $5 trillion required to pay for it. For all the rhetoric of tax loopholes and cleaning up the tax code, finding that kind of money would require looking at popular deductions and tax breaks for the middle class. Those include deductions for mortgage interest, charitable contributions and state and local taxes, and breaks for college savings, employer-paid health insurance and families with children.

Tax experts say he could very well come up short.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/09/30/presidential-candidates-deficit-plans-dont-add-up-analysts-say/#ixzz285WNs0rg

Make sure you read the WHOLE article by either Fox or AP (BTW, both are by AP).