It’s pretty obvious the McCain campaign is worried about Democratic arguments that McCain offers a third Bush term. With each passing day, the campaign goes to greater lengths to thread the needle — not denouncing Bush, but creating some distance from Mr. 25%, too.
Yesterday, McCain’s top policy adviser went so far as to label Bush’s policies a failure, and then insist it’s the other candidate who’s Bush-like.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin said the only similarity between McCain’s economic plan and Bush’s is a commitment to keep taxes low.
“Sadly, it seems that is all President Bush understood in the economy,” Holtz-Eakin said in an interview to be broadcast this weekend on Bloomberg Television’s “Conversations with Judy Woodruff.” It is Barack Obama’s budget plan, not Senator McCain’s, that resembles Bush’s policies, he said.
“It’s dedicated to the recent Bush tradition of spending money on everything,” Holtz-Eakin said.
This is so spectacularly dumb, it’s hard to believe Holtz-Eakin would say it loud. He’s not a dumb guy, which in some ways, makes this worse — Holtz-Eakin surely knows how wrong he is.
In fact, Holtz-Eakin has the entire story backwards. Bush and McCain aren’t just similar when it comes to the budget, they’re identical.
The Center for American Progress’ James Kvaal and Robert Gordon explain:
* Like Bush, McCain has proposed massive tax cuts that primarily benefit high-income households. McCain’s $300 billion a year in tax cuts — over and above the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts when they expire in 2010 — would essentially double the size of the Bush tax cuts and make them even more regressive.
* Like Bush, McCain’s massive tax cuts and spending on security leaves little for other priorities. Over the past eight years, other types of discretionary spending have remained essentially unchanged after inflation and population growth. McCain would continue the pattern of putting huge tax cuts and defense spending ahead of other needs, like preschool and renewable energy.
* Like Bush, McCain rails against wasteful spending in the abstract but fails to target any actual programs. His promises to eliminate earmarks and freeze spending could save $30 billion a year or even less. That leaves him short the quite noticeable sum of $270 billion a year. (Holtz-Eakin told Bloomberg that McCain has a secret plan to balance the budget, but he hasn’t shared it with the Concord Coalition — or those of us at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, for that matter.)
* Like Bush, McCain is likely to drive up the national debt by trillions of dollars. Bush took a debt of $3.4 trillion — and headed down — up to $5.4 trillion. McCain’s budget plan would drive the deficit to $12.7 trillion.
To hear Holtz-Eakin tell it, McCain’s economic worldview is entirely different from Bush’s, because McCain doesn’t like to spend money. But as Jonathan Chait recently explained, you know who else disagrees with George W. Bush on spending? George W. Bush.
The president has been lamenting excessive spending for years now. Bush’s line is the same as McCain’s: The tax cuts are swell, but “[t]hat’s just one part of the equation. We’ve got to cut out wasteful spending.”
Actually, McCain is following the pattern of not just Bush but every Republican president since Ronald Reagan. Phase One is to enact tax cuts and promise that they’ll cause revenues to rise, or will cause revenues to fall (leading to spending cuts), or somehow both at once, so, either way, there’s no possibility that it will lead to deficits. Phase Two is deficits. Phase Three is to blame the deficits on big-spending congressional fat cats and to issue increasingly strident threats to cut expenditures, without going so far as to identify actual programs to cut.
Bush thinks the root of the problem is pork-barrel spending. McCain thinks the root of the problem is pork-barrel spending. Bush thinks a line-item veto would solve the trouble. McCain thinks a line-item veto would solve the trouble. They’re both wrong, for identical reasons.
Indeed, McCain just doesn’t seem to understand what’s actually going on with the budget.
[T]he growth of government under Bush is mostly due to higher spending on defense and homeland security, which have grown from 3.6 percent of the economy to 5.6 percent. Domestic discretionary spending (that is, programs other than entitlements) has fallen as a share of GDP, from 3.1 percent to 2.8 percent. (These numbers come from Richard Kogan of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)
McCain is promising to cut taxes by $300 billion per year on top of the Bush tax cuts, which he would make permanent. In addition to this, he promises to balance the budget in his first term. When asked how he could possibly pull this off, McCain has asserted that he could eliminate all earmark spending, saving $100 billion per year.
Except, as we already know, that’s impossible. The $100 billion figure is imaginary. The McCain campaign originally found a report suggesting it could cut about half of that from the budget in wasteful earmarks, but then the McCain gang backtracked upon learning that those earmarks included funding for foreign aid to countries like Israel and other allies, which McCain promised not to touch. In reality, the campaign has quietly conceded, it thinks it can cut $18 billion from the budget by eliminating “bad” earmarks.
So, in the over-active imagination of the Republican presidential candidate, $18 billion = $300 billion. No wonder this guy thinks we’ve already drawn down U.S. troops in Iraq to pre-surge levels — the poor man can’t count.