John McCain has an earmark problem. I don’t mean a problem with earmarks; I mean an earmark problem. It includes confusion over what an earmark is, how much they cost, and whether he actually likes them or not.
To briefly recap, McCain, presenting hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts this week, said the cuts wouldn’t necessarily worsen the deficit. The key, his campaign said, is McCain’s commitment to cutting spending by eliminating congressional earmarks. Got it.
Except, as Kevin Drum explained very well yesterday, McCain and his campaign had a problem: “The two most serious studies of the subject suggest that total spending on earmarks is less than $20 billion — and McCain didn’t think that was impressive enough. He needed a bigger number in order to buck up his bona fides as an anti-spending crusader. So he turned to an old CRS report that pegged the earmark number at $52 billion.”
Problem solved, right? Wrong. ThinkProgress found that if we use the CRS report as a guide to what constitutes an earmark, and accept McCain’s vow to reject all earmarks as president, that means McCain necessarily opposes aid to Israel, funding for military housing, money for drug eradication in Colombia, and humanitarian aid to Haiti, among other things.
The problem, of course, is that McCain is stuck in a trap of his own making. He can claim to cut $52 billion from the budget by eliminating earmarks, but then he ends up opposing funding that he actually supports. He can accept the actual figures for earmarks (about $18.2 billion), but then he’d have to concede that he isn’t anywhere close to financing his lavish tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.
Yesterday, McCain solved one of his problems by changing the definition of “earmark” back to the original meaning.
As ThinkProgress has previously noted, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) campaign promise to “veto every bill that has a pork-barrel project on it” if elected president would result in $65 billion of cuts to programs, including U.S. funding assistance to Israel and funding for military housing. Now, McCain’s top economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, says that McCain is changing the definition of earmarks. Under the new definition, “there are between $16 billion and $18 billion” of earmarks in the current budget. Holtz-Eakin “declined to say whether McCain would ever begin to name programs he’ll cut.”
And this, of course, leaves us with McCain’s other problem.
Specifically, he’s really, really bad at arithmetic.
John McCain’s plan to cut taxes and balance the budget wins praise from fellow Republicans. Economists and nonpartisan analysts say his numbers don’t add up.
McCain’s proposal, outlined April 15, would extend President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, reduce the top corporate rate, repeal the alternative minimum tax and double exemptions for dependents. Price: $3.3 trillion by the end of a President McCain’s second term in 2017, according to figures from his campaign and the Treasury.
The Arizona senator said that would be offset by eliminating pork-barrel spending, freezing a portion of the budget, and saving from Medicare spending. He could cut the budget by $100 billion a year “in a New York minute,” he said in a Bloomberg Television interview yesterday.
Robert Bixby, executive director of the Washington-based Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates budget restraint, said “the huge imbalance” in McCain’s plan “is that the tax cuts are specific and large and the spending cuts are small and vague.”
Once, McCain was a deficit hawk, Bixby said, but “strange things happen when people run for president.”
When it comes to McCain, truer words were never spoken.
According to McCain, he can eliminate all earmarks, cut Medicare, freeze portions of the budget, and increase federal revenue through economic growth. It’s a wildly unrealistic, fantastical proposition that no serious person could believe. But even if we were to assume that McCain could do all of those things, his own campaign concedes that it would save $1.5 trillion over eight years — $1.8 trillion short of the cost of his tax cuts.
In other words, if we go exclusively under McCain’s own projections, which are tilted in his direction to the point of comedy, he expects to rack up nearly $2 trillion in debt, even if — especially if — he gets everything he wants.
And best of all, his projections are almost certainly wrong. As McCain sees it, his tax cuts would cost $3.3 trillion. Bloomberg News noted, “The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated his tax cuts would total $5 trillion over a two-term presidency. The Tax Policy Center, run jointly by the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, said they would cost at least $5.7 trillion.”
Since they know what they’re talking about, and McCain doesn’t, I’m inclined to use their figures.
As Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute recently said, “I don’t think anybody’s numbers add up when they run for president. I do fear that [McCain’s] don’t add up the most.”
Maybe we should chip in to get McCain a calculator.