Back from vacation, only to find horror
Apparantly McCain is going to vow to Balance the budget by the end of his first term
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to promise on Monday that he will balance the federal budget by the end of his first term by curbing wasteful spending and overhauling entitlement programs, including Social Security, his advisers told Politico.
The vow to take on Social Security puts McCain in a political danger zone that thwarted President Bush after he named it the top domestic priority of his second term.
McCain is making the pledge at the beginning of a week when both presidential candidates plan to devote their events to the economy, the top issue in poll after poll as voters struggle to keep their jobs and fill their gas tanks.
“In the long-term, the only way to keep the budget balanced is successful reform of the large spending pressures in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” the McCain campaign says in a policy paper to be released Monday.
“The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.”
The pledge is a return to an earlier position he’d later backed away from. On April 15, McCain backed off a February pledge to balance the budget in his first term when asked about it by Michael Cooper of The New York Times, who reported that McCain said “at a news conference … that ‘economic conditions are reversed’ and that he would have a balanced budget within eight years.”
McCain advisers admit that the document is a repackaging of previous policies, without dramatic new initiatives. Some Democratic officials had thought McCain might try to make a splash by proposing a bold middle-class tax cut.
Jason Furman, Obama’s economic policy director, called McCain’s pledge “preposterous.” Furman pointed out that the Congressional Budget Office now estimates a 2013 deficit of $443 billion, assuming the Bush tax cuts are extended. And he estimated that McCain would have to cut discretionary spending—including defense—by roughly one-third to bring the budget into the black by then.
“McCain would have to pay for all of his new tax cuts and other proposals and then, on top of that, cut an additional $443 billion from the budget—which is 81 percent of Medicare spending or 78 percent of all discretionary spending outside of defense,” Furman said.
Isn’t balancing the Budget a good thing, you might be asking; yes when you have an intelligent plan to do so, but McCain’s is not feasible.
First off McCain’s plans to cut discreationary spending and pork and closing loopholes won’t come close to covering his spending needs:
And that’s just comparing his spending cuts to his tax plans, add in Iraq and Afghanistan along with other defense spending and the gap gets even larger; on defense McCain seems to want a contradictory spending plan, merging cuts and increases on various aspects of the budget, but considering the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, hoping for victory dividends in those conflicts any time soon is probably a fools’ errand. On top of that our economic news gets worse and worse and worse, with jobs being lost and consumer confidence at record lows, so hoping for an economic boost to bring in high revenues is not likely any time soon. In fact as gas prices get higher, consumers will have less disposable income, as more goes into the bare necessities.
This leaves McCain only one real route to fulfilling his pledge, while keeping all the other plans he wants, cutting entitlements and other social programs (not to mention cutting the budgets of a lot of government agencies), things like Medicare, Social security, and welfare programs would have to face deep cuts during his “overhauls”, in order to come close to covering the spending gaps. That would mean further hurting the lower income families and the elderly, the people who depend on those programs for support, those who are hurting the worst from this recession.
One can only hope this is another political pander by McCain.
