John McCain, Vindicated

Got to give the guy credit...he called it. Too bad so many guzzled the hopeychangey flavored kool-aid thinking they were one of the 95% that was going to get a tax cut.

Orszag at first dodged the question, saying he was sure the final Obama budget will "reflect a fiscally sustainable path." But the questioner persisted: Are those deficits sustainable? Relenting, Orszag said such deficits, in the range of five percent of the Gross Domestic Product, "would lead to rising debt-to-GDP ratios in a manner that would ultimately not be sustainable."

The simple version of that is: If the Congressional Budget Office projections are correct, we're headed for hell in a handbasket.

I asked McCain what might happen if Obama and Orszag get their way. First, the U.S. could have to print a lot of new money, "running the huge risk of inflation and returning to the situation of the 1970s, only far worse," McCain said. The second option is to raise taxes.

Just this week, former Clinton budget director Alice Rivlin conceded that Obama's budget could present a "scary scenario" that would "raise deficits to unsustainable levels well after the economy recovers." The solution, she wrote, is higher taxes, and not just for the richest of the rich.

Of course, that's what McCain said during the campaign. And it's what the much-maligned Joe the Plumber said, too. Remember when he took so much flak for objecting to Obama's plan to raise taxes only on those Americans making more than $250,000 a year? Joe didn't make anything near that, the critics said, so why was he worrying?

This is the second time a Democrat president has promised tax cuts on the campaign trail and then broken the promise. You'd think voters would have learned a simple truth by now: you aren't going to get tax cuts out of Democrats.

Update - In the comments, FireHorse corrects the record:

To be fair, President Clinton didn't renege on his pledge of a middle-class tax cut. President-elect Clinton did that. He couldn't even wait until he took office to make bad on his word.

(My source, by the way, is Bob Rubin's memoir -- hardly a Clinton detractor -- and, of course, he didn't phrase it like I just did.)

Update II Cuffy Meigs, psychic.

More here.

posted by Slublog at 08:20 AM

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