McCain's Terrible Economic Plans

(first in a two-parter!)

John McCain spent most of the Republican primary campaign tooling around on his wife's jet without paying much of the cost. At the same time, he was saying publicly that he was forced by his cash-poor campaign to fly coach and carry his own bags. It's a good metaphor for his economic plans, which offer a free ride for the wealthy and connected at the expense of the peons below the hard deck of 30,000 feet (or a million dollars, depending on the metaphor), while using double-talk to make them sound somehow populist. McCain wouldn't just make the Bush tax cuts permanent - he would add in a whole other round of new corporate tax breaks and eliminate the alternative minimum tax instead of recalibrating it to do the job it was meant for (ensuring that the wealthy pay some tax rather than use creative accounting to deduct their income completely away). Paul Krugman takes a look:

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.

But before I get to that, let’s look at what I found truly revealing: the McCain campaign’s response to the Tax Policy Center’s assessment. The response, written by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office, criticizes the center for adopting “unrealistic Congressional budgeting conventions.” What’s that about?

Well, Congress “scores” tax legislation by comparing estimates of the revenue that would be collected if the legislation passed with estimates of the revenue that would be collected under current law. In this case that means comparing the McCain plan with what would happen if the Bush tax cuts expired on schedule.

Mr. Holtz-Eakin wants the McCain plan compared, instead, with “current policy” — which he says means maintaining tax rates at today’s levels.

But here’s the thing: the reason the Bush tax cuts are set to expire is that the Bush administration engaged in a game of deception. It put an expiration date on the tax cuts, which it never intended to honor, as a way to hide those tax cuts’ true cost.

The McCain campaign wants us to accept the success of that deception as a fact of life. Mr. Holtz-Eakin is saying, in effect, “We’re not engaged in any new irresponsibility — we’re just perpetuating the Bush administration’s irresponsibility. That doesn’t count.”

Frequently the numbers in Presidential plans don't add up, but we're talking about $5 trillion dollars, which is far more fiscally irresponsible than the plans of both Democrats, despite the New York Times offering the pathetic lede in their story that all three "could significantly swell the budget deficit and increase the national debt by trillions of dollars." When the Democrats' plans are less than 1/3 in cost of McCain's, that shoudl kind of be noted up front, especially when every question directed at a Democrat about federal spending automatically includes "but how are you going to pay for that?" as a given. You'd think the fact that McCain really, really needs to figure out how he's going to pay for anything, like his own salary, under his budget plan, would merit a highlight.

And then there's the faux-populist, "I'm on your side" rhetoric that is at odds with virtually every policy he advocates. This happened all last week on his "Forgotten Places" tour, and now we see it's happened again - his advance people can't find a location for his speeches that isn't deeply embarrassing:

Kicking off his “Call to Action Tour” today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) toured Miami Children’s Hospital, where he “met and listened to some of its young patients and their parents.” In remarks delivered at the hospital, McCain pledged that he would “work to eliminate the worries over the availability and cost of health care” [...]

McCain’s use of the Florida children’s hospital to launch his health care-focused tour is ironic considering McCain’s recent vote against expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. The expansion that McCain opposed would have extended coverage to a significant portion of Florida’s 658,000 uninsured children.

The expansion passed despite McCain’s protestations, but President Bush vetoed it in October, which McCain said was the “Right call by the president.”

There's literally nowhere McCain can visit without a call back to some horrible vote he made that's at odds with the majority of the public. SCHIP will be a major part of the 2008 election and he's on the wrong side of it.

Of course, he could just hold the rallies on the private jet at 30,000 feet...