Greenspan Disparages McCain’s Tax Plan

Greetings all! I’m pleased to announce my first post here at The Zoo. I appreciate the opportunity to make new friends and to bring my voice to a larger audience. I’m going to try to post here at least three times a week. If you ever need your “Big Blue fix,” drop on by my original blog, The Left Anchor.

Alan Greenspan, a nearly iconic figure to economists around the world, has come out forcefully against John McCain’s tax plan. From today’s AP:

Alan Greenspan says the country can’t afford tax cuts of the magnitude proposed by Republican presidential contender John McCain — at least not without a corresponding reduction in government spending.

“Unless we cut spending, no,” the former Federal Reserve chairman said Friday when asked McCain’s proposed tax cuts, pegged in some estimates at $3.3 trillion.

“I’m not in favor of financing tax cuts with borrowed money,” Greenspan said during an interview with Bloomberg Television. “I always have tied tax cuts to spending.”

This is the greatest hypocrisy of Republican economic policy. They urge enormous tax cuts, but never bother to off-set them with spending cuts. Now, as a liberal, I wouldn’t agree with their policies even if they bothered to actually — you know — PAY FOR THEM, but that’s a moot point, because they never have and they never will. After more than thirty years in Washington, it’s hard to imagine McCain proposing any new plan to justify the reckless policies his party has pursued for more than a generation. In fact, the following passage could just as easily been written for the presidential campaign 20 years ago.

McCain has said that he would offset his proposed cuts — including reducing the corporate tax rate and eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax that has plagued middle-class families — by ending congressional pork-barrel spending, unnecessary government programs and overhauling entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

Yeah, good luck with that Johnny Boy. God knows how sick and tired Americans are of Social Security and Medicare. I’m sure slashing their benefits will go over like gangbusters. Even at its best, it wouldn’t cover the massive spending McCain intends to pursue through his new tax cuts. Actually, this brings me to a point that isn’t made often enough or clearly enough. Tax cuts are no different than any other government spending, and yet somehow, a politician can propose them, and the American voter doesn’t mind that their top candidates have just pledged to spend hundred of billions of dollars on corporations and the wealthiest Americans at the expense of the very social programs American’s love the most: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, etc.

So what’s the real difference between Obama and McCain; between the Democrats and the Republicans? It’s all summed up perfectly in this new chart put out by The Washington Post:

McCain seems to possess some fetish for the rich, while Barack Obama and the Democrats seem to be aware of the existence of those elusive “working Americans” we’re always hearing about. This is your choice in November. Use it wisely.

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