McCain Flip-Flops on Tax Cuts for the Rich
McCain Flip Flops on Tax Cuts for the Rich — by Catherine Morgan (cross-posted at the Care2 Election Blog)
From The Associated Press…
Republican John McCain said Sunday that cutting taxes and stimulating the economy are more important than balancing the budget, and accused both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama of supporting tax hikes that would worsen the impact of a recession.
“The goal right now is to get the economy going again,” the GOP presidential nominee-in-waiting said on ABC’s “This Week,” adding that he would put the country “on a path to a balanced budget” by attacking wasteful spending.
From Firedoglake…
Among other journalistic crimes in his softball interview on This Week, John McCain was allowed by George Stephanopoulos to waffle unchallenged on the question of tax cuts. McCain now fully embraces the cuts that he once said “offended his conscience.”
From The Carpetbagger Report…
To briefly recap, McCain, presenting hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts this week, said the cuts wouldn’t necessarily worsen the deficit. The key, his campaign said, is McCain’s commitment to cutting spending by eliminating congressional earmarks. Got it.
Except, as Kevin Drum explained very well yesterday, McCain and his campaign had a problem: “The two most serious studies of the subject suggest that total spending on earmarks is less than $20 billion — and McCain didn’t think that was impressive enough. He needed a bigger number in order to buck up his bona fides as an anti-spending crusader. So he turned to an old CRS report that pegged the earmark number at $52 billion.”
Problem solved, right? Wrong. ThinkProgress found that if we use the CRS report as a guide to what constitutes an earmark, and accept McCain’s vow to reject all earmarks as president, that means McCain necessarily opposes aid to Israel, funding for military housing, money for drug eradication in Colombia, and humanitarian aid to Haiti, among other things.
The problem, of course, is that McCain is stuck in a trap of his own making. He can claim to cut $52 billion from the budget by eliminating earmarks, but then he ends up opposing funding that he actually supports. He can accept the actual figures for earmarks (about $18.2 billion), but then he’d have to concede that he isn’t anywhere close to financing his lavish tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.
What do you think about McCain flip-flopping on tax cuts? Pandering to his base?
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Time: April 29, 2008, 9:58 pm
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