1. If the Clinton years showed us anything, it was that by encouraging entrepreneurship, which produces 80% of our jobs the entire country is lifted. 
2. Another thing Clinton proved is that by increasing the number of people in social services (police, fire etc) we increase employment, tax revenues and economic activity.
3. The other thing Clinton proved unwittingly is that treaties like NAFTA are inherently unworkable because they are used by big business to side-step the advances in product safety, worker safety and benefits that America spent the better part of 100 years inventing and maintaining. 
4. Thus we end up subsidizing slavery in other countries, and reducing the quality of products and services to American citizens. 

The Republican and Democratic presidential candidates differ strikingly in their approaches to taxes and spending, but their fiscal plans have at least one thing in common: each could significantly swell the budget deficit and increase the national debt by trillions of dollars, according to tax and budget experts.

The reasons reflect the ideological leanings of the candidates, with Senator John McCain proposing tax cuts that go beyond President Bush’s and the Democrats advocating programs costing hundreds of billions of dollars. But for fiscal experts concerned with the deficit, both approaches are worrisome.

With the national debt soaring to $9.1 trillion from $5.6 trillion at the start of 2001, in part because of the Iraq war and Mr. Bush’s tax cuts, a crucial question about the candidates to succeed him is “whether they are helping to fill the hole or make it deeper,” said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan organization that advocates deficit reduction. “With the proposals they have on the table, it looks to me like all three would make it deeper.”

Representatives of all three campaigns disputed such assessments, questioning the accounting methods analysts used to calculate the growing debt and saying they could enact their plans without making matters worse.

Mr. McCain’s plan would appear to result in the biggest jump in the deficit, independent analyses based on Congressional Budget Office figures suggest. A calculation done by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington found that his tax and budget plans, if enacted as proposed, would add at least $5.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Fiscal monitors say it is harder to compute the effect of the Democratic candidates’ measures because they are more intricate. They estimate that, even taking into account that there are some differences between the proposals by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the impact of either on the deficit would be less than one-third that of the McCain plan.

The centerpiece of Mr. McCain’s economic plan is a series of tax cuts that would largely benefit corporations and the wealthy. He is calling for cutting corporate taxes by $100 billion a year. Eliminating the alternative minimum tax, which was created to apply to wealthy taxpayers but now also affects some in the middle class, would reduce revenues by $60 billion annually. He also would double the exemption that can be claimed for dependents, which would cost the government $65 billion.

“High tax rates are driving many businesses and jobs overseas — and, of course, our foreign competitors wouldn’t mind if we kept it that way,” Mr. McCain said, laying out his economic plan this month in Pittsburgh. “We’re going to get rid of that drag on growth and job creation.”

On the expenditure side, Mr. McCain has called not only for continuing an open-ended deployment of troops in Iraq, but also for spending $15 billion annually to expand the Army and the Marine Corps and to improve health care for veterans, among other programs.

Mr. McCain’s advisers have said the new tax cuts would be paid for by eliminating earmarks and making large spending cuts, but they have not identified specifics. And they have spoken vaguely about making entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare less costly for the government. Mr. McCain’s chief economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said the campaign had simply presented its vision of what the tax code should look like and noted that some of the proposals would be phased in.

“I think what they ought to do is remember that the proposals are going to engender economic growth, which is the best thing you can do for near-term budget improvement,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin said, adding that Mr. McCain believed spending restraint was possible.

That vision for the tax code includes making permanent the Bush tax cuts, set to expire in 2010, which Mr. McCain once opposed in part because they were not accompanied by sufficient spending cuts.

“I voted against the tax cuts because of the disproportionate amount that went to the wealthiest Americans,” Mr. McCain said in 2004. “I would clearly support not extending these tax cuts in order to help address the deficit.”

In 2001 and 2003, Mr. Bush pushed through Congress tax cuts totaling nearly $2 trillion. The first set lowered income and estate taxes, and the second focused mostly on capital gains and dividends.

The McCain campaign does not figure the costs of extending the tax cuts into its deficit projections, although the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would cost an extra $2.2 trillion over the next decade.

When Mr. McCain outlined his tax cut plan, he backed away from his pledge to balance the budget during his first term, but said that he would do so by the end of his second term. And in an interview last Sunday on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” on ABC, Mr. McCain said he would push ahead with his tax cuts even if Congress did not approve his spending cuts.

Some conservative economists say that increased deficits in the short run are an acceptable tradeoff for tax cuts that they say will promote economic growth in the long run. And many liberal economists say that some of the Democratic spending proposals, like addressing the affordability of health care or improving education, are long-overdue investments that pay off handsomely even if they entail more red ink.

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have acknowledged that their various new programs would be costly but have outlined how to pay for them. But some fiscal monitors say they may be relying on overly rosy projections of how much savings their proposals would actually yield.

Mrs. Clinton has calculated that her universal health care plan would cost about $110 billion a year, while Mr. Obama’s somewhat more modest proposal would cost up to $65 billion annually, his advisers say. Both candidates have also talked of new government incentives and investment to encourage the development of alternative sources of energy, which would cost about $15 billion a year.

The Democratic candidates have suggested that they could finance these and other programs by allowing parts of the Bush tax cuts to expire. That, however, ignores projections of the Congressional Budget Office, which has already assigned those savings to deficit reduction.

In other words, unlike Mr. McCain, both Democrats say they would revoke the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. “At a time of war and economic hardship, the last thing we need is a permanent tax cut for Americans who don’t need them and weren’t even asking for them,” Mr. Obama said.

But they would retain those reductions meant to benefit poor and “middle-class” families, which they defined as the 97 percent or so of the population that lives on less than $250,000 a year, and they would count the estimated $50 billion generated by higher taxes on the wealthy as new revenue.

“Remember, you can only use this money once,” said Mr. Bixby of the Concord Coalition, “and with all the Bush tax cuts scheduled to expire, that money is already scheduled to come into the Treasury. But on the campaign trail, this has become a source of new spending.”

Mrs. Clinton’s aides have been perhaps the most specific in explaining how they would offset the costs of their proposals, and her campaign speaks of moving toward balanced budgets. “We’re not going into debt for the war in Iraq and tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans,” Mrs. Clinton has said, “but instead we are taking care of the needs of our people at home.”

Regarding gas taxes, Mr. McCain has proposed a one-time “tax holiday” for the summer. Mrs. Clinton also calls for suspending it in a new advertisement in Indiana, while Mr. Obama says that is a “bad idea” but opposes any increase in the tax.

On the spending side, Mr. Obama has argued that ending the Iraq war is one way to pay for some of the new programs, including creating a national infrastructure investment bank and increasing the foreign aid budget. But such savings, which Mrs. Clinton does not count on, would not immediately make their way into the Treasury, and some experts say it is not clear whether they would be sufficient to finance all the programs Mr. Obama has enumerated.

Mr. Obama has talked of spending that money on a variety of initiatives whose costs amount to about one-third of the war’s estimated annual cost of $150 billion. “It is clear that there ought to be some distinction between a candidate who says a withdrawal should start immediately and a candidate who says let’s maintain the war at the highest level,” said Austan Goolsbee, Mr. Obama’s senior economic adviser.

The fiscal outlook has been made even murkier by the explicit “no new taxes for the middle class” pledge that both Democratic candidates made at their debate in Philadelphia this month, exempting taxpayers making $250,000 a year or less from new levies.

Hearing such a promise “makes you very sad,” said Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center. “First of all, we don’t have enough revenue coming in to pay our bills.” In addition, he said, the notion that all the revenue that would be lost in a middle-class tax freeze can be made up by higher taxes on the wealthy “is not tenable.”