McCain Opposes Recovery Package Because It Has ‘Corporate Giveaways’ He Once Campaigned For

Posted by Ben Armbruster, Think Progress at 3:12 PM on February 3, 2009.

Over recent weeks, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has emerged as a vocal critic of President Obama’s recovery package, claiming it is too big and filled with “pork.” McCain now says he will not vote for the bill in its current form in part because the legislation, in his view, does not sufficiently reduce business taxes:

McCAIN: We should have cuts for business and business taxes and small business taxes should be cut. [CBS, 2/2]

McCAIN: We need to make tax cuts permanent, and we need to make a commitment that there’ll be no new taxes. We need to cut payroll taxes. We need to cut business taxes. [FNS, 1/25]

And of course, McCain campaigned for president promising $45 billion in tax breaks for the 200 largest corporations. Yet it seems McCain has had a quick change of heart. This morning, McCain sent out an e-mail blast to his campaign mailing list complaining that “the proposal on the table is big on the giveaways for the special interests and corporate high rollers, yet short on help for ordinary working Americans”:

It’s unclear why McCain is upset that stimulus doesn’t help “ordinary Americans.” The very point of Obama’s $819 billion recovery package is to revive middle and lower-income America, which have been hit the hardest by the economic crisis. The bill, for example, includes a $500-per-worker tax break, part of the middle-class tax cut that Obama promised during his campaign.

But it is McCain himself and his conservative colleagues who have been calling for doling out handouts to the “special interests” and “corporate high rollers.” Sen. Jim DeMint’s plan (R-SC) includes permanent tax breaks for corporations and wealthy Americans. In fact, Obama included billions in tax cuts for businesses in order to reach out to conservative members of Congress.

Tagged as: barack obama, john mccain, economic stimulus

Benjamin J. Armbruster is a Research Associate for The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress.