McCain's Top Campaign Adviser: Record Deficits Would Have Happened Under McCain, Too

The top economic adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign acknowledged on Monday that the U.S. would be running a historic deficit this year even if the Arizona Republican had won the White House.

In an interview on MSNBC, Douglas Holtz-Eakin argued that under McCain's stewardship economic policy would have been strikingly different than under Obama -- with a much smaller stimulus bill and government expenditures going down as opposed to up.

But the former Congressional Budget Office director did acknowledge that, even with these changes, the country "probably would still have a record deficit" as is projected under the Obama administration.

The acknowledgment by Holtz-Eakin is a blow of sorts to the GOP argument that the record-breaking $1.56 trillion projected deficit is solely Obama's responsibility. One hour after Holtz-Eakin's interview, for instance, RNC Chairman Michael Steele sent out a statement, lashing the White House for "growing the deficit by record proportions and killing jobs by raising taxes on small businesses."

In actuality -- as most sober-minded economists attest -- many of the deficit problems the current administration faces today are traced directly back to the policies of its predecessors. This, indeed, seems to be implicit in Holtz-Eakin's acknowledgment.

In December 2009, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that the then-$1.4 trillion annual deficit run by the government under Obama had much to do with the Bush administration's package of tax cuts, the wars it launched in Iraq and Afghanistan and its response to the recession.

Those findings mirrored a report released a month earlier by the Democratic-leaning Center for American Progress -- which concluded that much of the deficit was owed to the decrease in tax receipts the federal government was receiving as a result of the recession.

Comments

[VietVet67]

11:10 AM on 02/02/2010

We would probably be at war with Iran, too.

[blacktea]

10:33 AM on 02/02/2010

sure, McCain is a progressive tool.

[BeauRadley]

10:23 AM on 02/02/2010

Well Duh! Of course there would be along with tax cuts for the rich.

[mcmutter]

08:34 AM on 02/02/2010

Johnny Boy would have watched us fall into the Second Great Depression ......

[bola47]

07:36 AM on 02/02/2010

you will never see this story on faux news

[Annette Papaccio]

06:28 AM on 02/02/2010

under mccain/palin our economy would have been worse.

[GunnyJ]

06:10 AM on 02/02/2010

It would be interesting to know McC's spin on this truth teller.....

[bungerman]

02:29 AM on 02/02/2010

very nice deficit chart of presidential terms alongside senate control since Carter.

http://lh4.ggpht.com/_COsjOIxX8ws/SZ8aZIMcnRI/AAAAAAAAB0M/G99pERhhrdQ/National-Debt-Graph.png?imgmax=800

[AGlobalCitizen]

01:42 AM on 02/02/2010

This should be main.

[AGlobalCitizen]

01:43 AM on 02/02/2010

Throws the whole deficit wouldn't be so high under Republicans right out the window.

[Barbara2423]

11:52 PM on 02/01/2010

Everyone knows this except McCain and Palin.

[denmak]

01:39 AM on 02/02/2010

And Republicans and tea-baggers and the average, easily-influenced American unfortunately.

[BigPictureReg]

01:40 AM on 02/02/2010

Ahhh, no. If only that were true.

It's called, '...there's no good news in this other party's budget..you've got to vote for us again...'
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"We just did an 84 percent increase in a very short period of time of all this new spending. Democrats, since they took over Congress, increased domestic discretionary spending by $1.4 trillion," Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said on "Fox News Sunday."
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What he doesn't say is how much of that 84% is normal, trend line growth, how much of that 84% was already underway before this budget was put into play. When he says '...a very short period of time...', it's your choice whether to find out that this is over a 3-year period, or to assume (as he hopes you will) that it is mainly attributable to the Obama budget alone. It's YOUR choice, and his as well.

In a $10+ trillion economy, (where a 5% contraction equals a half a trillion dollars - we've exceed that in just 3 of the past 12 months alone) economic contractions can be absorbed, albeit quite painfully, through business failures, unemployment, drastic reductions in spending, reduced exports, etc., or they can be temporarily compensated for with substitutions, via increases to offset failures in one or more areas (consumer spending, capital Investment, government spending).

[quillsinister]

11:07 PM on 02/01/2010

McCain would have made up for the smaller stimulus bill when he bomb bomb bomb bomb bombed Iran.

I have no doubt we got the better of the two in the White House.

[ChiGuy]

10:39 PM on 02/01/2010

This, and other issues Obama was forced to deal with when he took office are like an out of control freight train and simply cannot be stopped on a dime.

From the beginning of the campaign on, Obama has been consistent in his message:
It won't take weeks, or even months to solve the country's problems. It will take years.

[Hirnlego]

09:53 PM on 02/01/2010

Here's what he said back in 2008
McCain's Economist: We Need Tax Increases
http://crooksandliars.com/2008/09/13/mccains-economist-we-need-tax-rises/
"If you do nothing on the spending side, you're going to have to raise taxes whether you're a Republican, a Democrat or a Martian,"

So how come, with this guy on board, the McCain campaign is still pushing tax cuts and more tax cuts even if they are fiscal suicide?

"It's the brand," he said, "and you don't dilute the brand."

_______________
The Corporations Already Outspend The Parties
http://politics.theatlantic.com/2010/02/the_corporations_already_outspend_the_parties.php

[caveman1313]

09:13 PM on 02/01/2010

um, i thought obama was elected in order to avoid what would have happened under mccain.

[lafayette2009]

09:33 PM on 02/01/2010

And the Republicans are claiming we would be better off under them so the factoid is relevant plus there would have been a lot more out of work and without the extended benefits.

[ComonSenseMan]

09:55 PM on 02/01/2010

Lets see.... "Douglas Holtz-Eakin argued that under McCain's stewardship economic policy would have been strikingly different than under Obama -- with a much smaller stimulus bill and government expenditures going down as opposed to up"

Lets compare that to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/31/AR2010013102302.html?hpid=topnews
Which shows that indeed Obama's stimulus is saving jobs... the number of jobs is very low to the level of jobs we've lost! Imagine what would have happened if McCain was in and has a "Much smaller Stimulus"! OUCH!!! It needs to be bigger MUCH MUCH BIGGER!!!!

[Jimtoday]

08:48 PM on 02/01/2010

Sadly, no amount of indisputable fact or reason will sway even one Republican in congress, or their GOP-minded citizenry. They seem to be immune to any fact if it counters the slick ideology of blaming, obfuscating, and denying any responsibility as to our economic state, or really any events happening between 2001-2009. They are motivated only by a limitless desire for self-enrichment, disastrous "trickle down economic" nonsense, and the destruction of President Obama. There exists no evidence of any other activity or goal. Despicable.