The Dubious McCain Economic Plan

Since John McCain is using this week to emphasize his economic proposals, more scrutiny is being applied to McCain's re-released plan.  From the New York Times analysis:

“(Balancing the budget) 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.

In his proposal, Mr. McCain said he would hold overall spending growth to 2.4 percent a year. That is a tall order because federal spending has been growing an average of more than 6 percent a year in the last five years.

Mr. McCain said he would also slow the growth of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and fiscal experts agree that he would need to do that to achieve his goal. But Mr. McCain did not give details of how he would alter those benefit programs, which have powerful constituencies, including older Americans, a huge health care industry and state and local government officials.

A longtime foe of pet projects known as earmarks, Mr. McCain said he would stop such spending. The Bush White House says earmarks this year total $17 billion, a comparatively small share of a $2.9 trillion budget.

C. Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, who worked in the Reagan administration, said Mr. McCain “may well be committed to balancing the budget in five years, but does not tell you how he would reach that goal.”

J. Bradford DeLong, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked at the Treasury under President Bill Clinton, said, “Senator McCain and his advisers want to claim they will balance the budget by 2013, but they have given us no clue and no plan to meet all the commitments he has made and still get there.”

I'm particularly interested in hearing Senator McCain how he intends to slow the growth of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid giving the population demographics and the rapidly increasing retirement rates of baby boomers. 

Senator McCain's plan just doesn't add up and the lack of detail lends no credibility to his proposals.

Comments

[Crian]

It doesn't make sense that he could balance the budget given his tax proposals combined with the cost of the war in Iraq, I can't wait for a comprehensive plan so the economists can start poking large holes in it.

[Jay McDonough]

That's the thing; it's unlikely there will be a comprehensive plan. Just smoke and mirrors.