Progress Illinois

Rather than come up with a tax plan of his own, it appears that newly-minted GOP congressional candidate Marty Ozinga decided to save time by simply copy-and-pasting the one put forward by John McCain. Indeed, Ozinga's fiscal platform, released today on his website, so closely mirrors McCain's as to be almost identical.

Cut the corporate tax rate? Check.

Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax? Check.

Make the Bush tax cuts permanent? Check again.

(Ozinga did manage to distinguish his economic plan from McCain's in one way: he favors repealing the estate tax entirely, while the Arizona Senator supports raising the exemption to $10 million. So take that for what's worth -- which ain't much.)

Here's what the Brookings Institution's Tax Policy Center wrote about the McCain/Ozinga plan:

"These proposals would reduce federal revenues by about $5.7 trillion over ten years if they could be enacted immediately. Under a more realistic assumption that they don’t take effect until October 2009, the cost would be about $5.4 trillion [...]

Cuts the size of those [McCain] proposes will require slashing discretionary spending and entitlements, and probably even reining in defense spending. Small wonder he has backed away from his earlier pledge to balance the budget—meaning that these tax cuts, like the ones signed by President Bush, will be paid for by our children.

McCain's tax plan is estimated to cost $300 billion per year and budget experts simply aren't buying his line that it will be offset by budgetary maneuvers such as eliminating earmarks and freezing nondefense discretionary spending. "The numbers don't come close to adding up," Robert Bixby, head of budget watchdog The Concord Coalition, told The Christian Science Monitor. Check out the Center for American Progress' "McCain Tax Cut Cost-O-Meter" for a sense of how unbalanced his books really are.

As Robert Jordan and James Kvaal recently wrote in The American Prospect, McCain's plan is "all dessert and no vegetables." Meanwhile, Ozinga looks to be heading back for seconds.