Flailing From One Solution To The Next

I mentioned in the last post John McCain's big idea today - cutting capital gains taxes this year to fix the economy. Um, virtually nobody has capital gains this year. In case you haven't been tuning in, the stock market is down a lot. It's absurd. But even more absurd has been his halting response to the economic crisis overall.

While John McCain claims that these times require a “steady hand on the tiller,” his reaction has been anything but. The most recent example saw the McCain campaign promising the rollout of new economic plans this weekend, but by Monday opting to give a new political speech. Today, in another erratic response to the financial crisis, McCain rolled out new spending proposals while his campaign argued that he had always planned to roll out new economic plans today, a day after saying they had no plans to unveil any new economic proposals. This comes less than a week after the sloppy rollout of his new mortgage plan, which found him and his head economic adviser disagreeing, within hours, about whether new funding would be needed to implement that plan. In the past month, McCain’s response to the crisis has “careened,” sometimes changing course within the span of a single day and this past spring, he offered three different housing plans after admitting that he didn’t anticipate the housing crisis. McCain’s unsteady responses over the course of this crisis have demonstrated how out-of-touch he is with the struggles facing working Americans and how ill-equipped he is to implement the solutions and changes that we need.

That pretty much says it all.

Looking at the substance of it, McCain's plan would also "Lower taxes for seniors tapping their retirement accounts and suspend rules that force seniors to liquidate their accounts during economic crisis." This would move capital out of the market at precisely the time when a capital injection is needed. That's not necessarily bad, but McCain himself said the goal is to "avoid an exodus of capital from the market," and then introduced a plan which would do that.

And, there's nothing in his plan about creating jobs, which is the only thing that would boost consumer spending, fully 2/3 of the economy in this country at this point. Same for regulation of the markets, which everyone acknowledges is needed at this time. (The regulation bill is going to be one of the big fights of 2009.)

Maybe he should go back to reading Greenspan's book...