This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 28th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Barack Obama, should he be elected president next week, will bring to the White House some ambitious spending plans, but with

a stock market in dramatic decline, a sagging economy and capital losses for wealthy taxpayers

for years to come, it's not clear where Obama would get the money he wants to fund his

programs, including refundable tax credits to low-wage workers.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds comments.

What a lot of people miss is that the refundable tax credits are in the tax code.

So even McCain isn't counting them as spending plans, but they really are.

I mean basically if you say to somebody, if you save a thousand dollars,

the government will write you a $500 check, most of us would say, well that's a strange

thing to do, but that is in fact one of his proposals. Another is that if you do a

hundred hours community service and you're a student, the government will write you a

4,000 dollar check that's $40 an hour pretty good for student pay for

nonprofit work and there's a bunch of them like that and then there's the famous one

where everybody who works

95% of those who work are supposed to get a $500 check. These are to a large

extent spending through the tax code.

There are partly tax cuts, but most of these folks

are not taxpayers, and that's the big issue there.

So that adds up, and I've used the Tax Policy

Center numbers because they do.

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