In yet another campaign misstep during McCain’s promotion of his economic proposals McCain trips over Bush:

(Marc Ambinder) In Colorado, it seems, Republican economic policies have benefits to at least one company….

President Bush, on November 4, 2006:

One of the entrepreneurs with me today is Duke Hanson, the cofounder of a company called Crocs. Crocs produces a hugely popular line of lightweight shoes, and over the past three years, they’ve expanded dramatically. Three years ago, Crocs had just 11 employees. Today, Crocs provides jobs for hundreds of Americans, and his shoes are sold all over the world. Duke calls this, “rocket ship growth.” Here’s what he says: “We’re bringing a lot of money in. We’re employing people and providing a product that millions of people love.”

Sen. John McCain, today:

Five years ago, the outdoor footwear company, Crocs, was started by a couple of entrepreneurs with a great idea, ingenuity and drive. This former small business now employs 600 people in Colorado alone, and sells over 50 percent of its products in 90 countries around the world. Building barriers to Crocs or any American company’s access to foreign markets will have a devastating effect on our economy and jobs, and the prosperity of American families.

McCain also picked a really poor small business symbol to illustrate his point. Crocs has tanked and now trades at one tenth its high:

Have a look at Croc’s stock price. (Symbol: CROX.) It peaked at $75 back in late October, but since then has plummeted to one-tenth of that. It last traded at $6.91. Whereas footwear like Uggs managed to outlive its initial hype and become a footwear mainstay, Crocs appear to be what its investors most feared: a fad.

Not only that, but Crocs has been pushing for higher trade barriers, not lower ones. In March 2006, Crocs filed a complaint seeking to block imports of copycat shoes made in Canada and China, claiming they violated a patent for “breathable footwear pieces.” (They won.) Compare that with McCain’s assertion in his speech that “protectionism not only puts a hidden tax on almost everything you buy, but it undermines American competitiveness and costs jobs. … Our future prosperity depends on opening more of these markets, not closing them.” (Video available here.)

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/trailhead/archive/2008/07/07/mccain-s-croc-up.aspx

I think they may be twins; if not, they are certainly related.

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(CNN) Sen. John McCain on Tuesday brushed off skepticism from economists and insisted he could balance the budget by 2013 by keeping taxes low and curbing spending.

Sen. John McCain says he has a plan to get the economy in order.

“We’re going to restrain spending, we’re going to have the economy grow again and increase revenues. The problem is that spending got completely out of control,” McCain said on CNN’s “American Morning.”

McCain is in favor of extending the Bush tax cuts, which are set to expire in 2010.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has projected that by extending the cuts, which McCain originally opposed, and including the additional cuts McCain has proposed, the deficit for 2013 would be somewhere around $439 billion to $445 billion.

McCain disputes those figures because “they’re static numbers — not saying that revenues will increase with a strong economy and with low taxes. That’s the difference, and I respectfully disagree.”
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“…with a strong economy….” –Does anyone here think he’s telling the truth?

McCain still has the ’300 economists’ dodge on his website, too.

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Which is it, by the first or second term, for balancing the budget?

(Bloomberg)
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McCain senior economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin repeated the 2013 goal in a conference call before McCain’s speech today. After the speech, Holtz-Eakin said: “The senator has always pledged to balance the budget by the end of his second term.” A McCain second term would end in 2017.
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If I was to prematurely speculate on what’s going on here, I’d say they have dropped the 4 yr. balanced budget projection– it was simply absurd, missing it’s mark by a quarter to half a trillion dollars. Now they are going with 8 years.

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Now that we know the “300 economists” never endorsed McCain’s economic proposal (see post 1), here’s another memo incident that can be characterized either in the category of a ‘comedy of errors’ or a ‘valley of mystification’:

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The McCain campaign also sent out a memo, reinforcing the point. “This year, Barack Obama returned to the United States Senate twice to vote in favor of a budget resolution which raises income tax rates by three percentage points for the 25, 28 and 33 percent tax brackets,” Holtz-Eakin writes in the memo. “This would mean a tax increase for those earning as little as $32,000. While Barack Obama campaigns on a promise of no tax hikes for anyone but the rich, we once again find that his words are empty when it comes time to act. In both March and June, Barack Obama could have put the force of his vote behind his words. Instead, he decided that ‘rich’ now means those making just $32,000 per year.”

But NBC’s Ken Strickland spoke with a Democratic aide at the Senate Budget Committee who said there was never a budget vote that said: Let’s raise taxes. What the budget vote did do was estimate how much additional revenue would be needed, and then it would go to the Finance Committee to determine how to raise that amount (raise taxes, close loopholes, etc).
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http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/07/07/1184635.aspx

Here’s a run-up on the not-likeliness of McCain’s proposal:

(NYT) The package of spending and tax cuts proposed by Senator John McCain is unlikely to achieve his goal of balancing the federal budget by 2013, economists and fiscal experts said Monday.

“It would be very difficult to achieve in the best of circumstances, and even more difficult under the policies that Senator McCain has proposed,” said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group.
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And the NR, while encouraged by the proposal, finds not enough red meat in it to stir middle Americans to vote for him.

(National Review)
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For Sen. McCain to raise the country’s long-term growth rate he must first get elected. Our advice to the senator: Improve the voters’ bottom line, and they will be much more likely to listen to what you have to say about growth, competitiveness, and prudence.

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I’m looking forward to what the press has to say tomorrow about how realistic and accurate it is!

Yeah, like the press knows anything about economics. Or anything else, for that matter.

There are many agencies within the government that overlap each other and we have too many people employed by the government who sit around doing nothing or just push papers around. These could be eliminated even though the dims would scream about people losing their jobs. Also congressional members have too many freebies and people working for them. They go around Washington like minor kings with their entourages in limousines yet. There are hundreds of ways to cut expenses if the executive and congress had the will. However, pork is the biggie. And pork is vote buying. Nothing more and nothing less.

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Medicare and Social Security funds were raided in the 1980s. They are run seperate from the general budget though. That’s why there are zero interest bonds in place of real money in those accounts. The shocker is that this money may have to be paid back in the general fund. Unemployment insurance is also seperate from the general budget, but that fund might have been raided too.

So what would the seperation between the general fund and taxes to the general fund look like for 2008? $1.7386 trillion would be coming in and $1.375 trillion (not including the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan) would be going out. That would leave a surplus of $363.6 billion. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan would have decreased it (using the average cost of $12 billion a month) to about a $219 billion surplus. Infrastructure upgrading is said to now cost $1.2 trillion spread out in the next 5 years. This money is not being spent just some things are patched over while bridges collapse. If it was spread out over 6 years, it would leave a surplus of $19 billion in 2008. Social security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and child welfare would show a deficit of $390.8 billion. Of course some of that would decrease as people would be hired to rebuild the U.S. infrastructure which would not only take people off unemployment, it would increase the amount of people putting money into those funds.

Entitlements make up about $12 billion a year. It should be part of the focus, but not the main focus. If entitlements were put in the bills to be voted on, they still might pass and there would be no savings.

The only way the budget will be balanced politically would be if one was to use set percents which would cause shortfalls to be equally distributed in everything including the war on terror, the military and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would

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(Politico) This morning, the McCain campaign sent out a press release: ‘OVER 300 ECONOMISTS SIGN STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF JOHN MCCAIN’S ECONOMIC PLAN.’

The statement leaves out two big chunks of McCain’s economic argument: the gas tax holiday and his promise to balance the budget by the end of his first term — there’s literally nothing in the release that mentions the deficit or national debt.

Amazing. This is the best they could do? To put it kindly this is inaccurate; to put it bluntly it’s misleading.

Those that decide follow McCain’s new proposal to balance the budget in one term are going to find noting more than a comedy of errors.

I’m looking forward to what the press has to say tomorrow about how realistic and accurate it is!

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