On the budget, Bush and McCain are eerily similar

June 2, 2008

The Up-Until-Recently John McCain took a fairly reasonable line on the federal budget. In 2001, this McCain saw Bush’s tax-cut plan as reckless and irresponsible, and voted accordingly. In 2003, the same McCain went in the same direction.

The New-and-Not-Improved McCain, of course, bears no resemblance to the Up-Until-Recently McCain, and has decided that Bush’s budget policies — you know, the ones that don’t work — are exactly what the nation needs four more years of. The difference, McCain says, is that he will take a firm stand against federal spending, unlike that careless scalawag in the White House now.

Jonathan Chait notes today that McCain is hopelessly confused.

[Y]ou 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.

As Chait explained, 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.

I was talking to some folks lately about McCain, and I was arguing that his approach to the budget didn’t make any sense. They just kind of nodded. So, I said, “No, really, McCain’s approach to the budget doesn’t make any sense.”

The print media, to its credit, has been reasonably good lately in pointing this out, but the issue hasn’t come close to permeating the broader narrative of the campaign. I think if most people were told what McCain plans to do with the U.S. budget, they’d laugh at how ridiculous it was.

This will face serious competition from McCain’s nonsensical foreign policy, his nonsensical healthcare policy, and his nonsensical national security policy, but his nonsensical budget policy is almost comical in its inanity.

An old man living in a fantasy world of his own creation. What’s next, active delirium?

  • “Jonathan Chait notes today that McCain is hopelessly confused.”

    At least he didn’t use the words “confounded” or “befuddled” or that McCain was suffering in a state of “Consternation”.

    This would all be wrong, just like using the term “losing his marbles bearings.”

  • And the thing about old powerful men who live in fantasy worlds… they’ll bite the head off of anyone they can who says they’re nuts. So watch the McCain toadies ride that train right over the cliff.

    yee-haaa!

  • …What’s next, active delirium?

    And then they’d hand it all over to Hucklebuck, if he was the VP.

  • Greg Anrig at The American Prospect has a good article on the absurdity of conservative economics. Here’s a sample:

    Most conservatives still haven’t begun to come to grips with the consequences — intended and unintended — of their own policies, no doubt because their anti-government, pro-market rhetoric worked so well for so long politically. So they continue to approach virtually every issue from the standpoint of minimizing government’s role.

    http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_problem_with_conservatism_is_conservatism_

  • The Republican budget philosophy, initially implemented by Reagan in 1980, has been wildly successful. The main idea-
    1) Promise tax cuts to voters while claiming through a combination of economic growth and waste cutting you can balance the budget.
    2) Deliver on tax cuts while ignoing spending cuts and the pain that goes with them, and blame the opposition for the deficit (or just ignore it).
    3) Remind the voters at the next election that you cut their taxes.
    4) Hope you die before the bills come due so you don’t have to deal with them.
    It’s been the key to their electoral success for thirty years, because most the voters close their eyes and hope THEY TOO will die before the bills come due.

    You can tell McCain isn’t serious about spending cuts because he hasn’t promised to hire David Stockman to run the budget office. At least Stockman honestly tried to make the cuts. When Reagan and Co. found out how painful thaey would really be, they gave up caring about a balanced budget. Anybody here old enough to remember “Ketchup is a vegetable”?

  • Anybody here old enough to remember “Ketchup is a vegetable”? — T Hurlbutt, @7

    Yup. I wasn’t a citizen then (and didn’t plan on becoming one) and couldn’t vote, so didn’t pay any attention to politics. Didn’t even know whether Ronnie was a Repub or a Dem. But I knew he was an idiot, when he said that. My son was in primary school then — first grade, I think — and that pronouncement applied to school lunches, which made it of interest. Even if I, myself, didn’t have a different opinion of ketchup, my son’s reaction would have been enough to clue me in. Like all small children he was somewhat averse to most veggies (though he loved spinach. Go figure). But ketchup? He could shovel it by the gallon, if only I’d let him… IOW, it was *not* a veg 🙂

  • I was a baby at the time of the Ketchup is a vegetable fiasco, only learned about it over a decade later, but if we have a McCain presidency we might be talking about Ketchup being the whole meal for most Americans

  • I enjoyed reading your piece on Senator McCain’s proposed fiscal policies, which provide little detail on how they will be paid for and should therefore be regarded cautiously. To really get the country’s exploding debt under control, we are going to have to focus on where the money actually is—and that includes entitlement programs. Despite growing consensus on the dire nature of the nation’s finances, straight talk about what we want government to do and how we plan to pay for government services is a rare commodity among leaders.

    Is there a way to explain the federal budget crisis– an issue which can be devilishly complex and couched in jargon – to typical citizens?

    At Public Agenda, we have been working to answer this question for several years in our *Facing Up to the Nation’s Finances* project along with our distinguished partners, The Brookings Institution, The Heritage Foundation, The Concord Coalition, and Viewpoint Learning. One of the objectives of the “Facing Up to the Nation’s Finances” initiative is to encourage just the kind of full public discussion of the core challenges to the federal budget and long-term sustainability that is needed to engage citizens and leaders. This non-partisan project is a multifaceted initiative involving large scale public engagement, outreach to political and media thought leaders, online “campaigning,” etc. to generate productive public dialogue on how to address the long-term challenges of Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid/the Healthcare System, and how to manage the debt and government accountability.You can check it out at: http://www.FacingUp.org.

    Thanks again for spurring conversation on this very important issue.

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