Yesterday, ThinkProgress noted that Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) economic advisers are abandoning McCain’s earlier talk of balancing the budget. According to the New York Times, his chief economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, “said that if the war and the personal and corporate tax cuts that Mr. McCain advocated added to the federal deficit and debt, so be it.” Holtz-Eakin added that he “would like the next president not to talk about deficit reduction.”
Apparently, no one gave the message to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who — while cheerleading for McCain on Morning Joe today — emphasized that “you can’t keep on growing the deficit” and said McCain has “made it very clear he wants to balance the budget.”
Watch it:
[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2008/04/romneydef.320.240.flv]
Scarborough is right to be skeptical. As the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s James Kvaal and Robert Gordon point out, McCain’s tax plan would:
– Double the size of the Bush tax cuts, costing more than $2 trillion in their first decade.
– Do virtually nothing for the middle class: only 9 percent of the tax cuts will go to the bottom 80 percent of households, while 58 percent will go to the top 1 percent of households.
– Follow Grover Norquist’s blueprint that’s been called a “stealth approach to tax reform” — and that aims to abandon progressive taxation in favor of a wage tax imposed mainly on low- and middle-income households.
As Holtz-Eakin himself admitted, McCain’s tax plan “will make deficits expand up front, no question.” Someone from the McCain camp should get the official talking points out to Romney: Deficits don’t matter.