Reality-Based Engineering

McCain and Taxes

Yeah, uh, I remember him hammering W on taxes during the 2000 debates in South Carolina (and so do others here, you can search for more here )...so, here's a JedReport montage of McCain's tax ideas...sounds like Obama's ideas to me, peeps...



And, here's the exact money quote that recall from that debate that made me proud, at the time, to vote for him in the Mass primaries:

I want a balanced approach. A working families tax cut—Governor Bush has 38 percent of his tax cut go to the wealthiest one percent of Americans—pay down the debt, Social Security and Medicare. If we're going to save Social Security, we've got to take a bunch of the non-Social Security surplus, pump it into the Social Security system, because we all know that it's going broke. If we do that, then people can then invest part of their own payroll taxes in investments of their choice. The difference between Governor Bush's proposal and mine is that I put a whole lot of money into Social Security, Medicare and paying down the debt. He puts a whole lot of money into tax cuts.... Because we'd lay this obligation on another generation of young Americans—$3.6 trillion. At town hall meeting after town hall meeting, I have average Americans stand up to me and say to me, Senator McCain, all these years of running deficits, we've accumulated this debt. We're paying more interest—as much interest, almost, on it as we are in spending on national defense. We ought to pay down that debt, and not saddle the next generation of young Americans with it.... Look, Alan Greenspan just recently said we shouldn't have these massive tax cuts like Governor Bush is proposing. We should pay down the debt. But working families need the tax cut.

The green highlighted text is what I recalled clearly from the debate, but note what I highlighted in red...the $3.6 trillion debt he alludes to in the 2000 debates is, sadly, a low projection but a heckuva lookahead by McCain at the time. And, per this bonddad post from this morning, here are the debt loads carried by the USG at the end of each fiscal year of the Bush administration:

09/30/2001 $5,807,463,412,200.06
09/30/2002 $6,228,235,965,597.16
09/30/2003 $6,783,231,062,743.62
09/30/2004 $7,379,052,696,330.32
09/30/2005 $7,932,709,661,723.50
09/30/2006 $8,506,973,899,215.23
09/30/2007 $9,007,653,372,262.48
09/30/2008 $10,024,724,896,912.49

We've added $4,217,261,484,712.43 to the debt...so, actually, McCain was closer (numerically, at least) than I thought!!

[update oct30] A good journal entry about historic tax rates.

Labels: 2000 Elections, 2008 Elections, dubya, John McCain, South Carolina, taxes

posted by jimboses @ 2:18 PM