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Mon 7 Jul 2008 7:50
by Kevin McGehee
[Get Offa My Lawn!]
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Uh-oh: John McCain is making promises. Again.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to promise on Monday that he will balance the federal budget by the end of his first term by curbing wasteful spending and overhauling entitlement programs, including Social Security, his advisers told Politico.
The vow to take on Social Security puts McCain in a political danger zone that thwarted President Bush after he named it the top domestic priority of his second term.
McCain is making the pledge at the beginning of a week when both presidential candidates plan to devote their events to the economy, the top issue in poll after poll as voters struggle to keep their jobs and fill their gas tanks.
“In the long-term, the only way to keep the budget balanced is successful reform of the large spending pressures in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,“ the McCain campaign says in a policy paper to be released Monday.
“The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.“
The pledge is a return to an earlier position he’d later backed away from. On April 15, McCain backed off a February pledge to balance the budget in his first term when asked about it by Michael Cooper of the New York Times, who reported that McCain said “at a news conference … that ‘economic conditions are reversed’ and that he would have a balanced budget within eight years.“ » McCain promises to balance budget
It’s a damn certainty these things need to be done, and the lack of action on Social Security is one major failure of George W. Bush. The only question is, if a Democrat Congress refuses to work with McCain—as it refused to work with Bush—what can we realistically expect from him?
If anything, McCain is even less likely to buck congressional Democrats than Bush has been. Unless he switches parties or something.
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