The Wonk Room would like to congratulate Robert Gordon, who will serve in the White House Office of Management and Budget. The Obama transition team announced today that Robert will be Associate Director for Education, Income Maintenance and Labor at the OMB.

Robert was an original and frequent blogging contributor here at The Wonk Room, and his posts helped establish us as a leading policy rapid-response blog. You can read all of his blog posts here.

We wish Robert the best of luck and thank him for his contributions.

Our guest bloggers are Robert Gordon and James Kvaal, senior fellows at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Alan Reynolds accuses us of being lawyers, not economists. We are guilty as charged. But the rest of Reynolds’ rant is wrong.

Reynolds disputes our organization’s estimate that John McCain’s tax plan is worth $3.8 billion to the five largest American oil companies. He claims that we excluded the oil companies’ deductions and credits from our analysis. But we did include deductions. And though we excluded credits — because they are not publicly available — they would have only increased the size of our estimate.

Our estimate is conservative in other ways as well. It used 2007 profits, even though oil companies are breaking all the records this year. It did not count McCain’s big expansion in deductions for business investment. And it did not include oil companies’ foreign profits.

We analyzed 200 companies last spring, and our results have been featured in millions of dollars worth of advertising. None of these companies have disputed our results. In fact, no one did until Reynolds wrote his column three days before the election.

Reynolds gets the big things wrong as well. There is little reason to think corporate taxes put American businesses at a competitive disadvantage. Corporate tax collections are among the lowest in the world because our code is riddled with special interest deductions, credits and exemptions that shield corporate profits from tax. While corporate tax reform is overdue, John McCain’s plan would drive up the deficit, shift the tax burden onto middle-class wages, and harm the economy.

Our guest blogger is Robert Gordon, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today, the McCain campaign is putting forward economist Martin Feldstein as a surrogate.

Feldstein is widely acknowledged as the “chief intellectual force behind privatization” of Social Security. That’s Feldstein’s own term. He wrote “The Case for Privatization” and “Privatizing Social Security: The Ten Trillion Dollar Opportunity.”

McCain personally endorsed Bush’s privatization plans as recently as March, but yesterday, he said “there is nothing I would demand” in a Social Security package and even said that tax increases are not “off the table.”

“Social Security privatization may be another example of the McCain campaign’s private agenda — the agenda the campaign keeps to itself.

Our guest bloggers are Robert Gordon and James Kvaal, senior fellows at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

John McCain’s balanced budget plan relies on steep cuts to U.S. spending in Iraq, according to a memorandum written by economic policy advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin and published in the Washington Post today. The plan calls for $150 billion in savings in 2013, which is only possible with the kind of timed mass withdrawal from Iraq he has criticized.

Here is what the plan says:

“Balance the budget requires slowing outlay growth to 2.4 percent. The roughly $470 billion dollars (by 2013) in slower spending growth come from reduced deployments abroad ($150 billion; consistent with success in Iraq/Afghanistan that permits deployments to be cut by half — hopefully more) …”

Whatever McCain says about cutting deployments in half, achieving $150 billion in savings would require a massive withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

First, U.S. spending in Iraq and Afghanistan totaled $171 billion in 2007, according to the Congressional Budget Office – and that includes money for Iraqi security forces, foreign aid, and veterans benefits. If current policies continue – and spending grows with inflation – the war might cost $200 billion in 2013. Cutting the cost by three-quarters, especially when other costs (like veterans benefits and foreign aid) will remain, would require a sharp, perhaps nearly complete withdrawal of troops.

The numbers from CBO look even worse. According to CBO, rapidly reducing the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 30,000 would save only $55 billion in 2013. So CBO is saying that a much bigger troop reduction than McCain wants would save barely a third as much money as McCain claims.

Finally, Obama’s own, more aggressive plan to withdraw forces from Iraq will save only $90 billion a year, according to his campaign.

McCain has previously said that an Iraq withdrawal timetable would mean “disaster” and “chaos, genocide.” But his own budget documents contain a plan not merely for withdrawal, but for mass withdrawal.

Our guest bloggers are Robert Gordon and James Kvaal, senior fellows at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Even while John McCain attacks Barack Obama for “changing positions,” he is pioneering the art of running on multiple contradictory positions – or so we argued yesterday over at the New Republic.

McCain says he’s for Social Security privatization, but his website says he isn’t. His website says he’s for repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax and sweeping corporate tax cuts, but his aides apparently told the Tax Policy Center he isn’t. His aides embrace a $3.6 trillion tax increase, except when it’s pointed out that middle-class households will pay more in taxes too. And so on.

Our timing was good: the McCain campaign continued the pattern yesterday. In a written statement, McCain criticized cuts to Medicare subsidies for insurance companies – subsidies his policy advisor said he opposed. And McCain aides reportedly told Larry Kudlow that McCain is backing away from climate change legislation – something other McCain aides denied.

Most likely, these contradictory positions reflect the contradictory political priorities faced by the McCain campaign: shoring up the base while reaching out to independents. As a result McCain is sometimes a supply-sider and sometimes a deficit-hawk. He wants to transform our health care system and Social Security at no cost to anybody. He wants to clamp down spending, just not any specific program with a constituency.

Our guest bloggers are Robert Gordon and James Kvaal, senior fellows at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The National Review today correctly notes that John McCain’s tax plan “offers very little in the way of direct benefits to Americans in the middle of the income scale.”

The Review then go on to suggest that the only McCain provision with any middle-class relief — doubling the dependent exemption — “would be worth only $525 per child per year. A more direct approach to reducing the overtaxation of families would be to expand the child tax credit.” We made that point back in April.

The Review finally suggests that McCain should make the child credit relief “applicable against payroll as well as income taxes.” Progressives regularly push for much the same thing, increasing the refundability of the child credit. “Refundability” is a word that dare not speak its name among conservatives. But this is also a good idea.

Kudos to the National Review.