That’s the New York Times’s headline. The Times should strike the “could.” For some people, the plan–abolishing the tax exclusion for employer-provided health coverage and replacing it with a flat tax credit that also covers individually-purchased coverage–would raise taxes. For other people, it would reduce taxes. Some people see their taxes rise and others see them fall any time you remove a tax break and lower tax rates, or flatten a tax break. Conservatives have never had serious problems with this sort of tax shift in principle.

What complicates the trade-off here is that some people would be getting a tax credit that goes beyond their income-tax liability and even their payroll-tax liability, and a lot of conservatives consider that type of tax credit to be indirect spending rather than a tax cut. If you take that view, then the McCain health plan is not just a tax increase for some people, but a net tax increase. On the other hand, McCain is promising to cut so many other taxes–to eliminate the AMT and to cut the corporate tax rate, for example–that he is, taken as a whole, a tax cutter. And his plan would enable us to avoid a lot of increases in taxes, spending, and regulation that our dysfunctional health-care system would otherwise generate.