When presenting hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts this week, John McCain and his campaign said the cuts wouldn’t necessarily worsen the deficit. The key, they said, is McCain’s commitment to cutting spending by eliminating congressional earmarks.<\/p>\n
On its face, the claim is simply foolish. Even if McCain could eliminate the entire practice of placing earmarks in the budget — a dubious proposition — Taxpayers for Common Sense did an exhaustive review of the 2008 spending bills and found $18.3 billion<\/a> in earmarks. With McCain’s tax cuts poised to cost about 22 times that much, the “solution” isn’t exactly budget neutral.<\/p>\n But this gets even more entertaining when we take a closer look at what’s included<\/a> among the earmarks McCain plans to eliminate.<\/p>\n Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has long portrayed himself as a staunch supporter of Israel. “Obviously,” McCain has said, “I have been a very strong proponent to the State of Israel.” He recently told the Jewish Journal that if elected president, he would “hit the ground running” and immediately get involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.<\/p>\n It is astounding then that McCain has essentially vowed to eliminate U.S. funding assistance for Israel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As it turns out, McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said McCain, if elected, would eliminate earmarks based on the definition used by the Congressional Research Service. And that includes, among other things, “economic and military aid to Israel and Egypt.”<\/p>\n So, does McCain plan to cut off economic and military aid to Israel? No, that funding qualifies as a good<\/i> earmark. John McCain will make an exception for at least one category of spending in his pledge to “veto every bill with earmarks”: aid to Israel.<\/p>\n ThinkProgress pointed out earlier that military and other assistance to Israel is included in definition McCain’s aides say they’re using of the term, to the tune of about $2.9 billion, about 5% of the total, depending on how you count.<\/p>\n “Senator McCain will bring wasteful spending under control, and he will ensure America remains committed to the security of Israel, including maintaining America’s assistance levels,” emails spokesman Brian Rogers.<\/p>\n That’s one thing about spending cuts: Much harder when you get to the details.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Quite right. It’s a reminder of why it’s just so difficult to take McCain seriously on matters of public policy. Pressed for details on what he believes, McCain a) loves vague generalities<\/a>; b) gets easily confused<\/a>; or c) decides his commitments are a lot more flexible than he’d like us to believe.<\/p>\n As for earmarks, he’s embraced a simplistic maxim: earmarks = waste. Confronted with evidence to the contrary, his opposition wanes. But therein lies the point — every earmark has a purpose and supporters who can defend it. <\/p>\n Where will McCain draw the line? He doesn’t know. How much will it save? He doesn’t know. When can we expect more concrete answers? He doesn’t know.<\/p>\n After a quarter-century in Congress, McCain’s quite an impressive candidate, isn’t he?<\/p>\n Post Script<\/i>: Just as an aside, if Dems really wanted to be aggressive, for the rest of the year, they’d argue, “McCain said, if elected, he would cut off aid to Israel, but later changed his mind.” Just sayin’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When presenting hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts this week, John McCain and his campaign said the cuts wouldn’t necessarily worsen the deficit. The key, they said, is McCain’s commitment to cutting spending by eliminating congressional earmarks. On its face, the claim is simply foolish. Even if McCain could eliminate the entire practice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nIt looks like McCain hadn’t thought this one through<\/a>.<\/p>\n