Staying on Bush’s Course: McCain's fiscal program is either a joke or a fantasy

[Contrary1]

:thumbsup:

"In the last week, the three remaining presidential candidates made big-picture economic speeches that were perfectly in keeping with the tone of their campaigns. Barack Obama delivered his speech, introduced by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (a potential Obamacan?), at Cooper Union, a venue long identified with great oratory. Hillary Clinton tactically delivered her speech in the current battleground state of Pennsylvania and offered a list of solutions. Both campaigns have remarkably detailed (and remarkably similar) platforms on how to attack the various economic woes facing America.

John McCain, fresh from a whirlwind tour aimed at demonstrating his foreign-policy credentials, took a somewhat different approach. There's an emerging theme surrounding his campaign: The problem with the last eight years isn't that the Bush administration had the wrong policies or was incompetent. No, the problem is that it lacked intensity. Which is why McCain is bent on offering a more concentrated, sustained, high-energy form of Bushism. Bush has been adamant about staying in Iraq until the end of his presidency; McCain is adamant about staying up to 100 years, if necessary. Bush has taken to carefully cherry-picking facts and metrics (the number of soccer games visible from the air, to cite one) to construct a narrative on how well things are going there. (I bet there weren't many soccer matches in Sadr City today. McCain prefers simple declarations to data points: "We're winning. I don't care what people say. I've seen the facts on the ground."

The same holds true for the economy. By virtue of his history as a deficit hawk, a foe of earmarks, an opponent of the Bush tax cuts, and the presence of reality-based advisers like Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, McCain deserves some benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, the brains behind the economic operation seems to be former Sen. Phil Gramm, the Texas A&M economist-turned-senator who confidently forecast in 1993 that the Clinton program of spending cuts and tax increases on the wealthy would be "a one-way ticket to recession." And the sections on McCain's Web site about domestic policy reveal, as Matt Yglesias noted, "a nearly astounding level of vacuity."

Reading McCain's economic agenda, and listening to his speech, it appears that the problem with the last eight years is that we haven't seen enough tax breaks for the wealthy, that economic royalism hasn't been pursued with sufficient vigor, and that the middle and working classes haven't been stiffed sufficiently..."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/129402

[thunder rising]

1. Clap louder children!!

[Juche]

2. Rub this in McCain's face

http://www.cbpp.org/1-31-07tax.htm

Making permanent the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and AMT relief would have a direct cost of $3.7 trillion over the next ten years (fiscal year 2009 through 2018), according to Joint Committee on Taxation and Congressional Budget Office estimates.
Without offsets, making the tax cuts permanent would increase the deficit and thereby add to the national debt. The interest payments needed to service this higher level of debt would amount to about $700 billion over the next ten years. Thus, the total cost of making these tax cuts permanent, including the related interest costs, would be $4.4 trillion over the ten-year period (see the appendix).



Right now we are in debt to China to such a degree that we can't force them not to put lead in their products they ship here. We are 10 trillion in debt, we are facing an entitlement crisis on the horizon, people can't afford healthcare, rent, food, fuel or college and McCain wants another 4 trillion in tax cuts that'll mostly go to the wealthy.

Combine that with his desire to stay in Iraq and possibly invade Iran and you are looking at a candidate who wants to spend $5 trillion or more in his first term in tax cuts that mostly go to the wealthy and on unneeded wars in the middle east.

If he wins in 2008 I will have lost all faith in America.