McCain is promising to cut entitlement programs first in his plan to fix the economy….good news for all conservatives:
“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.”
Obama’s adviser says its preposterous….Shocking!
“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.
But McCain thinks differently:
This Congress and this Administration have failed to meet their responsibilities to manage the government. Government has grown by 60 percent in the last eight years. That is simply inexcusable. When I’m president, I will order a stem to stern review of government, modernize how it does business and save billions of dollars. I will veto every single bill with wasteful spending. We aren’t going to continue mortgaging this country’s future for things Americans don’t want or need.
My opponent has a very different record on this issue. He has sought millions upon millions of dollars in earmarks since his election to the Senate. In 2007 alone, Senator Obama requested nearly $100 million for earmark projects. I have never asked for a single earmark in my entire career. He supported the $300 billion pork laden agricultural subsidy bill. I opposed it. He voted for an energy bill stuffed with give-aways to oil companies at a time of record profits. I voted against it.
Sounds all well and good but McCain may very well not have a veto proof Congress if he wins, and even when Bush had that veto proof backing he couldn’t get the overhaul of Social Security done due to the Democrats. But something needs to be done as Ed Morrissey points out how huge the entitlement problem has become:
In real terms, we have increased entitlement spending by 759% over the last 43 years. In 2007 dollars, we spent $582 billion in 1965, and in 2007 that has transformed into a $2.5 trillion boondoggle. What’s worse, the rate of increase has speeded up. We have added more than a half-trillion dollars over the last five years. It took 43 years to add a half-trillion 2007 dollars to discretionary spending.
While Obama wants to add to the entitlement programs with the big kahuna of entitlements…Socialized health care…at least McCain is talking about reducing it. Whether he can get it done or not is something else entirely.
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Amazing. This is the best they could do? To put it kindly this is inaccurate; to put it bluntly it’s misleading.
Those that decide follow McCain’s new proposal to balance the budget in one term are going to find noting more than a comedy of errors.
I’m looking forward to what the press has to say tomorrow about how realistic and accurate it is!
Medicare and Social Security funds were raided in the 1980s. They are run seperate from the general budget though. That’s why there are zero interest bonds in place of real money in those accounts. The shocker is that this money may have to be paid back in the general fund. Unemployment insurance is also seperate from the general budget, but that fund might have been raided too.
So what would the seperation between the general fund and taxes to the general fund look like for 2008? $1.7386 trillion would be coming in and $1.375 trillion (not including the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan) would be going out. That would leave a surplus of $363.6 billion. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan would have decreased it (using the average cost of $12 billion a month) to about a $219 billion surplus. Infrastructure upgrading is said to now cost $1.2 trillion spread out in the next 5 years. This money is not being spent just some things are patched over while bridges collapse. If it was spread out over 6 years, it would leave a surplus of $19 billion in 2008. Social security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and child welfare would show a deficit of $390.8 billion. Of course some of that would decrease as people would be hired to rebuild the U.S. infrastructure which would not only take people off unemployment, it would increase the amount of people putting money into those funds.
Entitlements make up about $12 billion a year. It should be part of the focus, but not the main focus. If entitlements were put in the bills to be voted on, they still might pass and there would be no savings.
The only way the budget will be balanced politically would be if one was to use set percents which would cause shortfalls to be equally distributed in everything including the war on terror, the military and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would
I’m looking forward to what the press has to say tomorrow about how realistic and accurate it is!
Yeah, like the press knows anything about economics. Or anything else, for that matter.
There are many agencies within the government that overlap each other and we have too many people employed by the government who sit around doing nothing or just push papers around. These could be eliminated even though the dims would scream about people losing their jobs. Also congressional members have too many freebies and people working for them. They go around Washington like minor kings with their entourages in limousines yet. There are hundreds of ways to cut expenses if the executive and congress had the will. However, pork is the biggie. And pork is vote buying. Nothing more and nothing less.
Now that we know the “300 economists” never endorsed McCain’s economic proposal (see post 1), here’s another memo incident that can be characterized either in the category of a ‘comedy of errors’ or a ‘valley of mystification’:
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/07/07/1184635.aspx
Here’s a run-up on the not-likeliness of McCain’s proposal:
And the NR, while encouraged by the proposal, finds not enough red meat in it to stir middle Americans to vote for him.
Which is it, by the first or second term, for balancing the budget?
If I was to prematurely speculate on what’s going on here, I’d say they have dropped the 4 yr. balanced budget projection– it was simply absurd, missing it’s mark by a quarter to half a trillion dollars. Now they are going with 8 years.
“…with a strong economy….” –Does anyone here think he’s telling the truth?
McCain still has the ‘300 economists’ dodge on his website, too.
In yet another campaign misstep during McCain’s promotion of his economic proposals McCain trips over Bush:
McCain also picked a really poor small business symbol to illustrate his point. Crocs has tanked and now trades at one tenth its high:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/trailhead/archive/2008/07/07/mccain-s-croc-up.aspx
I think they may be twins; if not, they are certainly related.