Picking up where Avenging Angel left off in his comprehensive diary earlier today, McCain Reverses Position on Balancing the Budget. Again. is this opinion column from Bloomberg News columnist Gene Sperling (formerly President Bill Clinton's top economic adviser and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund who advised Hillary Clinton in her suspended bid for the 2008 presidential nomination).
To whit:
McCain, who would like us to see him as holding a consistent and principled stance on tax cuts and fiscal discipline, is engaging in the mother of all economic policy flip-flops.
Follow me over the flip for a few more choice slivers...
If McCain's opposition to Bush's tax cuts was based on the unseemliness of letting deficits balloon for the benefit of top earners in a time of war, then his opposition should have grown stronger. Instead, it grew weaker and then collapsed.
and
With the public debt expanding, corporate profits near records, and family incomes down since 2001, McCain has made his signature economic proposal a corporate tax-relief package that will cost $2 trillion to $3 trillion over 10 years.
The brazen dishonesty of McCain's latest economic proposal (no doubt another brainchild of top McCain economic adviser Phil Gramm) is breathtaking. As Sperling points out,
the CBO estimates that a whopping 59 percent of the benefits of such a reduction would go to the top 1 percent of earners .... [even]
more regressive than the policies that led McCain in 2000 to blast Bush for having ``38 percent of his tax cut go to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.''
Read the entire item and get the full lowdown (with lots of valuable additional links) on McCain's latest economic not-so-slight of hand and then, if you wouldn't mind, please rec this up so folks can get and pass on the straight dope on McUnMaverick's ongoing dishonesty (and Avenging Angel's too while you're at it).