House GOP Makes, McCain Breaks 2012 Balanced Budget Promise
The once-vaunted Republican marketing machine has fallen and can't get up. On Monday, House minority leader John Boehner (R-OH) unveiled a new slogan for the GOP, only to learn that "The Change You Deserve," was fittingly already in use to market the anti-depressant drug Effexor. Now a central promise of the Republicans' 2008 rebranding effort, to balance the budget by 2012, is dead on arrival. As it turns out, Republican nominee John McCain already abandoned his short-lived, first term balanced budget pledge.
In the same unfortunate memo which comically proclaimed the GOP the party of change, Boehner and the House Republican leadership summarized their themes and promises for Americans' health, energy, national and economic security. Attacking the Democrats for "promises made, promises broken," the Republicans offered some bold promises of their own on the economy:
Economy. A stronger economy by stopping the largest tax increase in American history, cutting wasteful Washington spending, balancing the budget by 2012, passing serious entitlement reform and strengthening our housing sector.
Sadly, no one thought to first consult with the presidential nominee of their party. In April, just two months after promising to balance the federal budget by the end of his first term, John McCain gave up his pledge to erase the deficit by 2012.
Before abandoning his balanced budget pledge during his Pittburgh address yesterday, McCain had made it a feature on the campaign trail. For example, during a February 15th rally in La Crosse, Wisconsin, "McCain promised he'd offer a balanced budget by the end of his first term." He told the audience that he could end the red ink by 2012:
"I've got to give you some straight talk: I doubt, given the deficits we're running, that I can propose a balanced budget in the first year. But that's my goal. It has to be our goal, because we're mortgaging these young people's future."
Alas, McCain's life as a deficit hawk was a short and unhappy one.
Even as Mr. Straight Talk was promising a 2012 end date for the budget deficit, his top economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin was reading from a different script, instead targeting the end of a McCain second term in 2017. And he should know. A month later, Holtz-Eakin, an architect of the McCain tax plan, admitted, "It will make deficits expand up front, no question." Just a day before McCain's April 15th economic address, Holtz-Eakin previewed the campaign's new position on balancing the budget:
"I would like the next president not to talk about deficit reduction."
For good reason. During an April 9th appearance at a Westport, Connecticut investment firm, McCain was grilled over his fuzzy math:
"Basically, which is it?" the man asked Mr. McCain. "Straight talk: Do you want to raise taxes, cut entitlement spending, cut defense spending, or have a deficit?"
McCain dutifully cited his idol Ronald Reagan as proivding the answer. Conveniently ignoring the fact that Reagan himself raised taxes three times and bequeathed a $300 billion deficit to his successor, McCain argued:
"That was when Ronald Reagan came to office in 1980. And so what did we do? We didn't raise taxes, and we didn't cut entitlements."
Of course, the McCain tax plan's budget-busting largesse to the wealthiest Americans would make Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush alike blush. As ThinkProgress meticulously detailed in late March, McCain has thrown budgetary caution to the wind:"
Our analysis suggests that the McCain plan shares five key characteristics of Bush policies. First, it is enormously expensive, costing more than $2 trillion over the next decade and essentially doubling the Bush tax cuts. Second, the McCain plan would predominantly benefit the most fortunate taxpayers, offering two new massive tax cuts for corporations and delivering 58 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The Bush tax cuts provide 31 percent of their benefits to the top 1 percent of taxpayers.
Third, the McCain tax plan continues the shift of the tax burden from investment income onto earned income. Fourth, the plan not only fails to address current tax shelter problems in the tax code but in fact will lead to increased sheltering. Fifth, McCain cannot pay for his tax cuts without massive reductions in Social Security, Medicare, or other key programs that benefit the vast majority of Americans.
That assessment came before McCain's widely panned gas-tax holiday proposed last month.
Appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews that same day, John McCain explained his about-face on a first-term balanced budget by pleading, "economic conditions are reversed." (No doubt, President Bush would offer the same excuse for his broken 2004 promise to halve the budget deficit by 2009.) Sadly for John McCain, the only conditions which have changed over the past two months is that the American people started learning the truth about his tax plan.
Apparently, John Boehner and the House Republican leadership didn't get the memo. And given their third straight loss in Congressional special elections, Effexor might just what the doctor ordered.
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