Presidential candidate Barack Obama introduced his tax plan in a speech yesterday. Unfortunately, it overflowed with bad ideas. First, Obama’s plan to increase dividend and capital gains taxes is out of step with global tax realities. Virtually all of the 30 major industrial nations provide relief for capital gains and dividend taxes. Indeed, a dozen major nations have capital gains tax rates of zero percent. And if the current dividend tax cut expires, the United States would have the highest dividend tax rate among major nations.

Second, Obama hasn’t got his math right. He claims that there is “$1 trillion worth of loopholes in the corporate tax code.” That is ridiculous. The entire corporate income tax collected only $372 billion in 2007.

Third, Obama proposed special tax breaks for seniors, which would take 7 million more elderly completely off the tax rolls. But that would inject a very unfair element of age discrimination into the tax code. Old folks are already taking young folks to the cleaners in terms of federal fiscal policy. Obama would make the injustice worse, yet he had the chutzpah to claim in his tax speech: “It’s time to stand up to the special interest carve outs.”

Fourth, Obama proposed a new payroll tax credit, but the tax code already has a huge program designed to offset the payroll tax—the Earned Income Tax Credit. Adding a new low-income tax “cut” on top would result in millions of people who already don’t pay any income tax getting an added $500 check from the government. That’s not tax policy, that’s simply looting from the people who do pay the federal tax bill.

I’m amazed Obama found two former Treasury officials who signed on to his plan because this isn’t tax policy in the sense of following any rational economic principles. It’s just crass political pandering using the tax code to bait votes.