McCain Does Not Understand the Budget

Posted by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report at 5:57 AM on June 3, 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.

Tagged as: bush, economy, mccain, budget