A Lot to Do, But Little to Do it With Under McCain Tax Plan
The NYT Times reports on John McCain's visit to Appalachia:
Senator John McCain walked in the literal footsteps of President Lyndon B. Johnson on Wednesday as he stood near the now-abandoned Appalachian front porch where Johnson declared a war on poverty. Forty-four years later, Mr. McCain said, “We have a lot to do.”
Mr. McCain, who was on the third day of a weeklong tour of America’s “forgotten places,” held out the promise of better Internet service and job training in community colleges to this economically depressed coal-mining town of less than 650 people.
While he offered few other poverty-fighting specifics in a speech that was largely focused on trying to connect to voters in one of the poorest parts of the United States, he sought to project himself to independents and moderate Democrats across the country as a different kind of Republican.
While McCain is right that "we have a lot to do", it should be noted that his radical, even-crazier-than-Bush-II tax cut plan would leave government bereft of the resources to do any of it. According to the Tax Policy Center, the McCain plan would reduce federal revenues by around $5.7 trillion over ten years and "pare government back to levels not seen since the Eisenhower administration."
In FY 2012, tax revenues would be reduced by about $550 billion compared with current law (with the tax cuts expired). That is roughly equal to CBO’s baseline projection for all nondefense discretionary spending.
McCain’s proposal is $300 billion bigger than all of President Bush’s FY2012 tax cut proposals. Tax revenues would be about 16.8 percent of GDP. By comparison, spending this year is about 20 percent of GDP.
McCain's anti-poverty proposals are notable only for being even less substantive than GW Bush's compassionate conservatism.
This is a good point Shawn. While there has been pretty good coverage of the insanity of the size of the tax cuts McCain has proposed, there hasn't been quite enough of the fact that he says he'll cut spending to balance out the tax cuts, all the while still providing for the needs of American communities.
McCain was on NPR yesterday afternoon claiming he could cut $100 billion annually very easily just by cutting earmarks and pork spending. Yet even the most broad, generous definition of pork spending show less than a fifth of what McCain is claiming to be able to cut - $17 billion. (See Citizens Against Government Waste estimates here). When asked yesterday on NPR about how he could balance investments in areas like Appalachia and large cuts ($100 billion) a year to many of those same program, McCain got a little testy.
I suppose that because he seems to be talking out of both sides of his mouth on this issue. You can't support investments and services in areas of need and claim you can cut more than a tenth of domestic discretionary spending at the same time and still seem credible. Especially when McCain offers no specifics whatsoever on what would be cut to get up to $100 billion.