Most people will never read the Tax Policy Center's new analysis of the presidential candidates' tax plans [1]. For policy wonks, of course, it's a gold mine. For most non-wonky voters, however, the real jarring statement is this paragraph:

One of the challenges facing anyone who wants to estimate the effects of candidates’ tax plans is that no one—not even inside the campaigns—knows exactly what the proposals are. Stump speeches and campaign white papers are often short on the technical details needed to analyze the proposals fully. In addition, the candidates’ plans are often works-in-progress that change during the course of a campaign.

Everyone in politics knows this, of course. The federal tax code runs to 65,000 pages, most tax legislation runs into the hundreds or thousands of pages -- and the fiscal plans of political candidates usually are a series of bullet [2] points [3]. Most voters aren't interested in knowing all the details of a candidate's plans, and they'll make their choice based on broad philosophy and personality -- but they probably want to believe the specifics exist in some file somewhere.

We could certainly use more detail, and the Tax Policy Center's analysis is a start. But as I said, most people aren't going to read it, and in any case there won't be any similar analysis for congressional candidates (who are major players on this). Taxes have a tremendous impact on the economy, in both obvious and subtle ways. But if you're going to make your choice based on general principles, you might want to consider this yardstick: Does the candidate seem to understand how much fiscal trouble we're in [4]? Or are they pretending the problem's not there? Because our fiscal problems have reached the point where they're going to shade everything else the next president and Congress do. A candidate who won't admit that, or worse, doesn't understand it, doesn't deserve your vote.

(For more on the budget, and particularly on earmarks, have a look at the latest entry on the Huffington Post blog [5], written with my Where Does the Money Go [6] co-author, Jean Johnson).