Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Evening Open Thread
- A lecture on work ethic from the most absent Senator?
- Waxman makes it clear that he's tired of the stonewalling.
Chat away...
Posted by
Michael Link at 6:03 PM | Comments (53)
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McCain Campaign: Now We Won't Balance Budget in First Term
ABC News, July 7: "At a town hall meeting in Denver, McCain vows to balance the federal budget by 2013, which would be the end of his first term as president."
Bloomberg, July 7: "After the speech, [McCain's senior economic adviser] said: ``The senator has always pledged to balance the budget by the end of his second term.'' A McCain second term would end in 2017."
And let's not forget, this isn't the first time he has abandoned his budget promises. But it's probably the fastest flip-flop in the history of flip-flops. I guess he didn't like that pretty much everybody has recognized that his economic policies aren't to be taken particularly seriously, since he's failed to actually present any numbers and show how he plans on affording everything, including the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest.
Posted by
Michael Link at 2:55 PM | Comments (1)
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Setting the Record Straight
This is what a real energy plan looks like:
Not just a bear hug of Bush's energy policies, which is what McCain offers.
UPDATE: More info on the Bush-McCain energy bear hug right here.
Posted by
Michael Link at 1:32 PM | Comments (2)
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McCain and Social Security
He has no plan, anymore, that he's willing to publicly admit to. In the past, he called his plan "privatization," and it was the same plan as the incredibly unpopular Bush proposal which would dramatically reduce benefits and divert payroll taxes into private accounts.
So it's safe to assume he still thinks the same thing, and just like Bush, he's refusing to upfront with people about his proposals until after the election. It's then that we could expect the bamboozle to continue right where it left off in early 2005.
But right now, here's the entirety of their plan:
Aides said McCain would not support a tax increase to address the solvency of the program, but they did not give further details.
So they won't tell you about their massive benefit cuts. And they won't keep repeating the word privatization, despite using it before to describe the same proposal and knowing that's exactly what it is. But they'll hope they don't get called out on refusing to level with us about what he really believes.
Posted by
Michael Link at 11:39 AM | Comments (1)
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McCain's Credit Card Budget
The reviews are in...
Experts agree that McCain's budget balancing rhetoric is just wishful thinking:
The package of spending and tax cuts proposed by Senator John McCain is unlikely to achieve his goal of balancing the federal budget by 2013, economists and fiscal experts said Monday.“It would be very difficult to achieve in the best of circumstances, and even more difficult under the policies that Senator McCain has proposed,” said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group.
McCain’s taxing proposals would only 'dig the hole deeper'
McCain also proposes a one-year freeze on the growth of non-defense government programs, which might cut the deficit by all of 2% to 3%. On defense, he says he would steer any peace dividend from concluding the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan to deficit reduction. That amounts to a kind of imaginary lockbox for hypothetical savings. [...] By endorsing a continuation of the Bush tax cuts and adding others, McCain digs the hole deeper. Obama would roll back the Bush tax cuts for high-income earners, but he'd spend the revenue on new programs for health coverage, alternative fuels and more.
Maybe he should get his story straight.
Posted by Mike Gehrke at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
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Morning Open Thread
Chat away...
Posted by
Michael Link at 9:22 AM | Comments (39)
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Monday, July 7, 2008
Evening Open Thread
- A Republican Congressman pulls a McCain.
- CREW filing Bar complaints for politicizing the Justice Department.
- McCain campaign: we’ll keep Bush tax cuts if we don't reduce spending.
Chat away...
Posted by
Michael Link at 7:37 PM | Comments (58)
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John McCain's Economic Plan: Pure Imagination
John McCain released a thirteen-page economic plan [PDF] that is comprised of all the same economic policies he has already bandied about but wrapped with a new name and pretty cover. It is, however, missing the original slogan: "Come with me and you'll be in a world of pure imagination."
The silly gas tax holiday -- which all the experts call a "gimmick", a "joke", and "pandering" -- conflicts with his stated support to boost funding for public transportation since gas taxes pay for -- wait for it -- public transportation, and infrastructure like roads and highways -- those things that public buses use. Even fellow Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) acknowledged that the gas tax holiday would "drive up the deficit."
Even McCain's own hand-picked economists his campaign touts as supporting his economic plan "reject 'two big chunks.'" Think Progress:
McCain campaign has released “a statement signed by over 300 professional economists” who support the senator’s economic plan. But as the Politico’s Avi Zenilman points out, the 300 conservative economists who endorse McCain’s plan still reject “two big chunks” of the senator’s proposal: “the gas tax holiday and his promise to balance the budget by 2013.”
McCain continues to claim that eliminating earmarks will help get the U.S. towards a balanced budget yet still cannot come up with specific cuts. John McCain claimed in the past that he would "veto every bill with earmarks," but when presented with the fact that American aid to Israel is labeled as an "earmark" by the Congressional Research Service, his campaign backed off the absolutist claim. In any event, when pressed about specific earmarks he would cut, John McCain came up blank.
And what kind of Bush/McCain economic plan would it be without billions in tax cuts for the rich that John McCain opposed before he supported it. When the McCain campaign is not blatantly distorting the tax plan offered by Senator Barack Obama, they distort their own and claim, like Bush did in 2000, that his cuts would benefit working Americans.
McCain says he will balance the budget by 2013 but how does he square that with his Iraq policy? John McCain claims we can stay in Iraq for decades in the mold of our garrisons in Germany and Korea (which he flip-flopped on). Yet, in John McCain's economic plan, he claims the "savings" from "victory" in Afghanistan and Iraq.
When it comes to getting the numbers to add up right, Josh Marshall paraphrases the McCain plan as "we'll get back to you on that."
Now, the general routine is the face of this kind of candidate announcement is that journalists and economists look at the numbers to see if they add up. In most cases, the exercises generates fairly unsatisfying contradictory opinions, with some experts saying one thing and other experts another.But here's the thing. McCain doesn't have any numbers. None. Not vague numbers of fuzzy math. He just says he's going to do it. Any other candidate would get laughed off the stage with that kind of nonsense or more likely reporters just wouldn't agree to give them a write up. But this is all over the place.
Sing it one more time, John: "... come with me, then you'll be in a woooooorld of pure imagination..."
Posted by
Matt Ortega
at 6:45 PM | Comments (1)
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McCain's Defense of NAFTA: Cheap Flowers
Jobs first!
"I buy flowers a lot cheaper when they are grown in Colombia than when they are grown in South Carolina. It has never been my ambition for any child to grow up to work in a textile factory. I would much rather have them work in a BMW plant or high-tech factory or other kinds of employment for which we can provide the training and education."
Posted by
Michael Link at 3:28 PM | Comments (4)
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Sick Workers Left Behind
McCain’s fend-for-yourself approach to healthcare leaves older, sicker workers behind:
To the degree that happens, the employer-based market will become less healthy as sicker, older workers stay with their employer-based coverage while more of the healthier workers move to the individual market."What you'll see happening is average cost in the employer-market will go up and average cost in the individual market will go down," Fronstin said. "You'll start to get into a cycle where people at the margin start to leave employer coverage for individual coverage. At some point, employers will start to ask: Why am I doing this if my workers don't value it anymore? If I don't need to do this to be competitive in the labor market, why should I do it?"
And he'd do little to ease Americans’ healthcare pains:
Why should insurers work to lower prices or health care use when they can shun high-cost people in the first place? And what incentive do insurers have to invest now in promoting better health and improving the system when others will benefit later?
Posted by Mike Gehrke at 12:02 PM | Comments (1)
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Obama to Accept Nomination in Front of 75,000
Senator Barack Obama will accept the nomination of the Democratic Party on August 28 at INVESCO Field in front of 75,000 people. Tickets will be free and the event open to the public. Ten supporters who donate $5 or more will be flown to Denver with a friend to meet Senator Obama backstage and watch history unfold.
Posted by
Matt Ortega
at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)
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McCain: More of the Same Economic Policies
Keep digging, John McCain. Let's take a look at how his latest campaign promises are being described:
NYT: “Mr. McCain’s aides said, he will not offer any significant new economic programs or ideas.”
Politico: “McCain advisers admit that the document is a repackaging of previous policies, without dramatic new initiatives.”
So what are those same old ideas that have been touted before, most notably by President Bush? Well, first, he makes reference to "privatizing" (to use a term McCain used to describe it) Social Security and slashing benefits, since he's in favor of the same proposal that Bush floated in 2005 that was widely rejected by the American people.
He's also promising, once again, to balance the budget by by the end of his first term -- despite his numbers for all of his new spending not adding up. FactCheck.org and the Washington Post's Fact Checker has already taken him to task for his failure to put forward an honest economic plan. As the WaPo noted, he's still refusing to identify any cuts that he plans to make, which -- as they also note -- makes it hard to take his promises seriously.
And then there's his claim that he'll put American "jobs first." But as you can watch below, there's not a whole lot of truth to that, either:
Posted by
Michael Link at 11:06 AM | Comments (1)
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Morning Open Thread
Chat away...
Posted by
Michael Link at 9:06 AM | Comments (78)
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Thursday, July 3, 2008
Evening Open Thread
Chat away...
Posted by
Michael Link at 6:18 PM | Comments (119)
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More Jobs Lost
As Think Progress points out, this is the sixth straight month of job losses. The latest monthly jobs report, released this morning, shows payrolls falling another 62,000. And where is John McCain?
He's in Mexico promoting NAFTA.
Posted by
Michael Link at 12:23 PM | Comments (4)
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