Last night, at one of those ubiquitous Washington cocktail receptions, I ran into an old friend who, for more than two decades, has been a policy analyst at a federal agency. Her hair-raising story, familiar to many inside the Beltway, is worth retelling as a new president prepares to take office. My friend runs a modest research shop within the bowels of a huge agency. Her job, to oversimplify a bit, is to take a hard look at billions of dollars of federal programs to determine what works and what doesn't.

The debate over bailing out the auto industry is producing a veritable fleet of Pinto-like policy prescriptions. And they get worse by the day. First, an aide to Barack Obama hints the President-elect is considering an auto czar who'd have the authority to force the industry to retool in return for billions in taxpayer assistance. The Russian image is a good start, but the czar thing may be historically premature. Maybe better to call him the Commissar of Cars.

Well, not exactly. But I wanted to get your attention. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mt.) has unveiled a blueprint for major health reform. And it includes a call for scaling back the tax benefits of employer sponsored insurance. Baucus has put on the table a variation of John McCain’s plan to scrap that benefit and use the money to finance a refundable credit for anyone buying insurance (either in the individual market or though their employer). This would be the very same idea that Barack Obama so frequently ripped as a massive tax increase on your health care.

Note to President-Elect Obama: Don't do it. I understand the politics. I even get the symbolism—iconic industry and all that. But the economics is really bad. Here are five reasons why:

Retrieved from the dustbin of the Wall Street Journal Letters Editor In his Nov. 1 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Alan Reynolds excoriates journalistic fact checkers for their carelessness, citing some of our estimates for support. But then he is similarly careless when he claims the Tax Policy Center (TPC) estimate of corporate rate cuts, “…is also nonsense because it's entirely static. The estimate assumes raising or lowering corporate tax rates has no effect on corporate decisions about where to locate production, income or costs, and no effect on the economy's performance.”

In a remarkable year, we have seen financial bubbles burst throughout the world. It is, say the market gurus, a deleveraging of historic proportions, unwinding decades of overreliance on easy money. But one bubble remains. It is the U.S. fiscal bubble. While other borrowers around the world are getting crushed by the sudden disappearance of credit, the U.S. Treasury is tapping bond markets at a once-unimaginable pace. On Nov. 3, Treasury announced it would have to raise $550 billion in the quarter ending Dec. 31. That is on top of the $530 billion it raised from July to September. More than $1 trillion in new debt. In six months.

Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States and will govern with huge Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. What will he do? In his two-year campaign for president, Obama made many promises he cannot keep, and was exceedingly vague when it came to what he would do about critical issues such as the nation’s ongoing financial crisis. However, it is possible to make some educated guesses about where he’d try to take the country in the face of some major challenges.

After two years, endless charges and countercharges, the 2008 campaign is down to its final day. It seems like a good time to take stock of what I liked about this race and what I did not. I liked fact checking. Never before in a political campaign have so many done so much to call out candidates who fudge, exaggerate, manipulate data, and outright lie. I don’t know that all of this fact checking slowed the growth in irresponsible rhetoric, but it made us far more aware of each bit of blarney. I like that TPC did its part on taxes and health, and props to others out there doing similar work.

With the election a day away, today seems to be the appropriate time to summarize the differences in the candidates’ plans. The main differences are two: first, McCain proposes much larger tax cuts than Obama; and second, Obama’s plan tends to favor low- and middle-income taxpayers while McCain’s plan is more beneficial to those with higher incomes.

Have you seen the new tax calculators produced by the Obama and McCain campaigns? The idea is simple enough—make tax real for ordinary voters. Instead of talking about trillions of dollars or 95 percent of working families, describe what an Obama or McCain presidency would mean for real taxpayers.