Candidates' Plans Sketched in Red Ink (Congressional Quarterly Weekly)
"You can't say you're going to repeal something that you're already going to let expire," says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal policy watchdog group. Obama and Clinton both describe their policies as paying for themselves. But the candidates' definition of paid-for differs from the definition used by the Democratic leadership, which reintroduced the pay-as-you-go concept when it took over Congress a year ago. In Congress, following the pay-as-you-go rule requires new spending cuts or tax increases to offset any changes in federal policy that would deviate from the CBO baseline. ...