McCain Says He’ll Balance the Budget By 2013
Have you heard the joke about how John McCain promised he would balance the budget in his first term and the press took him seriously?
Ooops. It’s not a joke:
At a town hall meeting here today, McCain touted a repackaged plan to boost the nation’s economy, but left out plans to balance the budget in four years and explore privatization of Social Security that his campaign is advocating.
The presumptive GOP presidential nominee acknowledged that the economy is “slowing” and said that he would create new jobs through lowering taxes and opposing health-care mandates on small businesses. “Small businesses are the job engine of America, and I will make it easier for them to grow and create more jobs,” he said. “My opponent wants to make it harder by imposing a ‘pay or play’ health mandate on small business.”
[...]
In a conference call Monday morning, campaign economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said the balanced budget plan focuses on “broad-based efforts at controlling discretionary spending, keeping growth rapid, and reviewing programs for their effectiveness.”“But anyone who’s looked at the fiscal picture of the United States understands that over the long term, the budget will remain balanced only as quickly as the Democrats come to the table and undertake bipartisan, comprehensive reform of the entitlement programs,” Holtz-Eakin added.
Hilzoy has crunched the numbers and written a long and detailed post about why this is nonsense. If you read only one other blog on this, make it hers.
Josh Marshall is incredulous:
I think we may have come to that moment, that quick turn of events, that encapsulates the fact that there is apparently no limit to the howlers and nonsense that John McCain can throw out and still not generate collective guffaws or even scrutiny from the national political press.
Bear with me on this one because it’s genuinely mind-boggling.
Today John McCain is getting lots of press for his new plan to balance the budget during his first term — what can only be called an extraordinarily ambitious promise. The first pick was from Mike Allen’s piece late last night in The Politico.
Now, the general routine is the face of this kind of candidate announcement is that journalists and economists look at the numbers to see if they add up. In most cases, the exercises generates fairly unsatisfying contradictory opinions, with some experts saying one thing and other experts another.
But here’s the thing. McCain doesn’t have any numbers. None. Not vague numbers of fuzzy math. He just says he’s going to do it. Any other candidate would get laughed off the stage with that kind of nonsense or more likely reporters just wouldn’t agree to give them a write up. But this is all over the place.
Considering that the current deficit is in the neighborhood of $410 billion, it’s going to be a neat trick, indeed, to eliminate it through the elimination of “wasteful” spending. Then again, the Bush White House lists among the highlights of the 2009 budget the fact that it “Balances the budget by 2012.” Indeed, OMB projects a $48 billion surplus.
It’s noteworthy that the 2009 request is $987.6 billion, an increase of $46.2 billion (4.9 percent) from the previous year. And that’s not counting $75.8 billion in “Supplemental and Emergency Funding” (down from $104.4 billion). Balancing the budget, then, would require finding waste and reforms that would shave the budget by a quarter.
Social Security, incidentally, is only $8.4 billion.[*] The entire Health and Human Services budget? $70.4 billion. Housing and Urban Development? Another $38.5 billion. Environmental Protection is $7.1 billion. Interior, $10.6 billion. (Those are FY 2009 requests; the appropriations will differ somewhat.) So, let’s say we reform those to run with such efficiency that they are totally self-sustaining. That’s $135 billion in savings. Only another $275 billion and we’re home free! Education is another $59.2 billion. Labor, $10.5. National Science Foundation, $6.9 billion. And “Other Agencies” — how important could they be, really, if they don’t get mentioned by name? — are $7.2 billion. That’s another $83.8 billion, getting our deficit down to $191.2 billion. If we can achieve victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by, say, the one year anniversary of McCain’s inauguration, we can save that, easy.
McCain does go back and forth on this one, though. Maybe we should just wait five minutes:
Senator John McCain is pledging once again to balance the budget by the end of his first term in 2013, his advisers said Monday, reverting to an earlier pledge he had abandoned in April when he proposed a series of costly tax cuts for corporations and high earners and said it might take two terms to balance the budget.
It is unclear how Mr. McCain plans to balance the budget, given that fiscal analysts who have examined his economic plans say that his calls to extend the Bush tax cuts while cutting corporate and other taxes would likely increase the deficit.
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In February, Mr. McCain had proposed balancing the budget by the end of his first term as president. But when he announced a series of tax cuts in April, he said that he would balance the budget within eight years. He said then that “economic conditions are reversed,” making it difficult to balance the budget earlier.But now the McCain campaign is pledging once again to balance the budget by the end of the first term of a McCain presidency. Mr. McCain’s senior policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said in a conference call Monday morning that his “plan is to balance the budget by the end of his first term in 2013.’’
More at Memeorandum.
