Will McCain's economic policies cost more?

I posted this to a message board on September 25, 2008:

The Tax Policy Center did an analysis (PDF) of the candidates and concluded that Obama's economic plan is better. I am doubtful of the results. I was not able to find a similar analysis for the 2004 election to check their accuracy. The Laffer Curve says that taxes can reach a maximum level and after that they start to hurt revenue and it seems like they ignore it and just assume that all tax cuts are bad. The Washington Post has an article saying that overall income taxes would drop a lot more under McCain.

Obama wants to raise capital gains to 20%, but McCain wants to leave it at 15%. McCain plans to lower the corporate tax rate, Obama wants to leave it at 35%. McCain wants to lower the estate tax and raise the exemptions, Obama wants to leave it at current levels. Although it only impacts a couple thousand businesses. Obama said the analysis doesn't take Iraq into consideration, I'm not sure of his military budget plans, but I think he wants a bigger presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan and you can't rule out political and economic ramifications of an early pull out from Iraq. Obama also wants the government to pay for transportation infrastructure and to spend more in Africa to fight aids and poverty. Plus you have his universal healthcare plan. I'm not sure what their different approaches are to energy and global warming, but Obama wants to spend a lot on alternative energy and impose a tax on oil profits.

The CBO has historal budget data. The one part I didn't understand is the public debt category, because I thought our national debt was about double what they said. During the first seven years of President Clinton's term, the public debt increased by 632.7 billion and for the first seven years of President Bush's term the debt increased by 1.6253 Trillion. For Clinton during that same period revenues averaged 1.478 Trillion while for Bush they averaged 2.091 Trillion. I don't know if they take inflation into account, but it seems that Bush's tax cuts have had a huge impact by raising revenues about 41.5% and showing that our tax rates were too high.

At that time,  I sent a message to Greg Mankiw and he said he would consider this issue in a future blog post, but I'm not sure if he ever did.