McCain's economic and tax proposals generally have three characteristics:
1. He advocates, and sometimes claims credit for previous advocacy of, positions that in fact he has voted against, criticized, ignored, or simply ignored. If he's a maverick, he's breaking ranks with himself.
2. He tends to favor reduced or lower tax burdens on high-income individuals and big corporations; roughly, where Obama favors progressive taxation, McCain favors regressive or at least far less progressive approaches. This may or may not be a bias in favor of the donor base in the Republican Party; for some on the right there is a moral cast to this attitude.
3. He believes, or at least accepts the point of view, that large corporations should shape the direction of the economy. For that reason, he supports mergers toward consolidation, tax breaks for big firms, big tax breaks for the biggest firms, few or no social obligations on big firms, rights for employers as opposed to employees, and high barriers to entry for entrepreneurs and other rivals of big firms. This is a statist approach to economic management; it is not Schumpeterian competition but rather old style European managed capitalism.

This at least is how I decode McCain's policies. In this sense, they are very true to the central nexus of the Republican Party's structure, and they explain, among other things, McCain's ability to raise a great deal of money in a top-down, hierarchical manner.

It was slipped into public domain today. Little was made of it by the McCain campaign, but I reviewed it. Seems to me that there are three issues:

• McCain asserts that there should be a tax credit of 10 percent of wages for each r and d employee, but this proposal means that there would be a hand-out of cash (approximately $8 billion per year by my calculation) to existing firms even if they added no new employees in r and d and made no new investment. Moreover, if they built a solar farm or a new manufacturing facility, they would NOT get the r and d credit. Can he possibly mean that? This appears to be a hand out to support the status quo and would not do anything to encourage new investment or new job creation. Do I misread this?
• McCain suggests that firms providing broadband access to rural and low income users would get tax breaks that apparently would equal their costs. In other words, the big communications companies would have the government cover (in whole?) their costs for providing service. What kind of service? How much money? How many people? I can't figure any of that out with precision, but given that we have about 45 million households without broadband, I could imagine that the tax break for the handful of firms that provide internet access would amount to as much as 45 million households times $500/year (rough estimate of cost per household) or $22.5 billion a year. If market shares now extant hold constant, that would be a tax break of about $8 billion a year for the two Bell companies alone. Can this be what McCain really wants? If not that, what is he proposing?

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