McCain’s Economic Speech is Self-Contradictory

Senator John McCain is on record as saying he isn’t much on economics. He made a big speech yesterday at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh yesterday that proved it. While he hit the usual GOP themes, and while he played the populist card, he also decided that what America didn’t need was subsidies and bail-outs. He then proceeded to offer subsidies and bail-outs.

At the opening, he set a fine tone and laid out a very common sense approach, “Economic policy is not just some academic exercise, and we in Washington are not just passive spectators. We have a responsibility to act -- and if I am elected president I intend to act quickly and decisively. We need reforms that promote growth and opportunity. We need rules that assure fairness and punish wrongdoing in the market. We need tax policies that respect the wage-earners and job creators who make this economy run, and help them to succeed in a global economy. In all of this, it will not be enough to simply dust off the economic policies of four, eight, or twenty-eight years ago. We have our own work to do. We have our own challenges to meet.” Shortly thereafter, it got muddy.

He spent a lot of time hammering away on earmarks, money voted for a legislators’ pet project back home; he cited Hillary Clinton’s support for a Woodstock Festival Museum. He wants to abolish earmarks (by vetoing everything with an earmark in it) and use the $100 billion saved to cut business taxes from 35% to 25%. He wants to phase out the Alternative Minimum Tax for everyone. And he wants to raise the deduction for dependents from $3,500 to $7,000. Since the speech fell on the day Americans had to file their income tax returns, this was auspicious. But surely, these are simply presidential earmarks, giveaways to his national constituency.

Another giveaway was, “I propose that the federal government suspend all taxes on gasoline now paid by the American people -- from Memorial Day to Labor Day of this year. The effect will be an immediate economic stimulus -- taking a few dollars off the price of a tank of gas every time a family, a farmer, or trucker stops to fill up.” Cutting the tax OPEC has put on the global economy by driving up the US federal deficit so that John Q. Public can do some extra driving this summer is an earmark.

Then, he proceeded to scare everyone, “If I’m elected president, I’ll work with Congress and the states to make job training and unemployment insurance what they should be -- a swift path from a job that’s not coming back to a job that won’t go away.” The jobs that have left are solid manufacturing jobs for the blue collar workers and data processing and call center jobs for white collar workers. What’s left is flipping burgers and greeting people at Wal-Mart. Reading between the lines, it’s clear that he knows his policies such as they are will cause job loss in America.

What summed the speech up most was “In a free market, there must be transparency, accountability, and personal and corporate responsibility. The housing crisis came about because these standards collapsed -- and, as president, I intend to restore them.” But the only time the word “regulation” appeared in the speech was in reference to tax laws, not to the behavior of Wall Street. Either Mr. McCain is a very canny politician who is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of voters on his “more of the same” economics, or he really is an unsophisticated thinker on such matters. Neither case bodes well.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Kensington Review Home