On 4/15/08, McCain outlined his taxing and spending plans:

McCain's proposal, outlined April 15, would extend President George W. Bush's tax cuts, reduce the top corporate rate, repeal the alternative minimum tax and double exemptions for dependents. Price: $3.3 trillion by the end of a President McCain's second term in 2017, according to figures from his campaign and the Treasury.

The Arizona senator said that would be offset by eliminating pork-barrel spending, freezing a portion of the budget, and saving from Medicare spending. He could cut the budget by $100 billion a year "in a New York minute," he said in a Bloomberg Television interview yesterday.

Robert Bixby, executive director of the Washington-based Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates budget restraint, said "the huge imbalance'' in McCain's plan "is that the tax cuts are specific and large and the spending cuts are small and vague.''

Once, McCain was a deficit hawk, Bixby said, but "strange things happen when people run for president.''

Economist Paul Krugman summarizes McCain's tax plan:

First, Mr. McCain proposes making almost all of the Bush tax cuts, which are currently scheduled to expire at the end of 2010, permanent. (He proposes reinstating the inheritance tax, albeit at a very low rate.)

Second, he wants to eliminate the alternative minimum tax, which was originally created to prevent the wealthy from exploiting tax loopholes, but has begun to hit the upper middle class.

Third, he wants to sharply reduce tax rates on corporate profits.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the overall effect of the McCain tax plan would be to reduce federal revenue by more than $5 trillion over 10 years. That’s a lot of revenue loss — enough to pose big problems for the government’s solvency...

If truth be told, the McCain tax plan doesn’t seem to embody any coherent policy agenda. Instead, it looks like a giant exercise in pandering — an attempt to mollify the G.O.P.’s right wing, and never mind if it makes any sense. 

McCain's Medicare plan includes a

quiet bombshell proposal to make Medicare beneficiaries with higher incomes pay more for their prescription drug benefits, a notion that furthers the privatization (and in the eyes of many health care advocates, the diminution and eventual death) of Medicare...

many health care advocates see McCain’s proposal is just another opening to privatize Medicare and destroy it as a social insurance program, under which everyone who has paid into the system is entitled to equal benefits as a matter of right. A provision that was tucked into the recent law that gave seniors the drug benefit (Part D) already requires wealthier beneficiaries to pay more for the Medicare premiums that cover doctor visits and outpatient services (Part B). If drug benefits, too, are based on income, critics fear that support for the program will eventually erode as those with more choices and more money will opt out of the program and buy coverage from private insurers.

The New York Times mentioned it in a front page piece, noting that the proposal would affect not just billionaires but couples earning more than $164,000 and single people with incomes of $82,000. But it didn’t go beyond that...

McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin revealed the most when he said in the Post story: “You could make this as aggressive as you want to get more savings.” In other words, if the government saves $2 billion by making couples with incomes greater than $164,000 pay higher premiums, it could save $6 billion by moving down the income ladder to, say, $100,000 or even less.

Here's an analysis of McCain's plan by the Center for American Progress Action Fund