Attitude: McCain Edition.
McCain's economic and tax proposals generally have three characteristics:
1. He advocates, and sometimes claims credit for previous advocacy of, positions that in fact he has voted against, criticized, ignored, or simply ignored. If he's a maverick, he's breaking ranks with himself.
2. He tends to favor reduced or lower tax burdens on high-income individuals and big corporations; roughly, where Obama favors progressive taxation, McCain favors regressive or at least far less progressive approaches. This may or may not be a bias in favor of the donor base in the Republican Party; for some on the right there is a moral cast to this attitude.
3. He believes, or at least accepts the point of view, that large corporations should shape the direction of the economy. For that reason, he supports mergers toward consolidation, tax breaks for big firms, big tax breaks for the biggest firms, few or no social obligations on big firms, rights for employers as opposed to employees, and high barriers to entry for entrepreneurs and other rivals of big firms. This is a statist approach to economic management; it is not Schumpeterian competition but rather old style European managed capitalism.
This at least is how I decode McCain's policies. In this sense, they are very true to the central nexus of the Republican Party's structure, and they explain, among other things, McCain's ability to raise a great deal of money in a top-down, hierarchical manner.
Sounds strangely like a version of mercantilism, that disastrous economic policy that gave rise to laissez-faire capitalism. It matters little whether the cottage-industries of a town are being protected by disallowing any competition from the outside or whether giant corporations are being protected from competing interests, the point is both lead to stagnant, inert economies completely devoid of innovation.
Of course, McCain himself admitted that he knew little about economics. But then why am I surprised that the less one knows about anything, the more failed endeavors a perusal of his background reveals, the more likely it is that he'll become president of the US.
August 16, 2008 2:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
It seems that
(1) has absolutely nothing to do with policies, so it raises the question of your intent in this post
(2) is pretty standard libertarianism, grounded in moral values (egalitarianism)
(3) Republicans have been for centuries claiming that they oppose regulation that enforces unnecessary conformity and that they favor providing incentives instead of setting the limits
Let's compare notes on what policy decoder devices we're using. And I'm not even a Republican.
August 16, 2008 4:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
McCain supports and casts his ballot in the senate according to money and who gets it. His past and present rhetoric in public are substantially in conflict with his senate voting record.
And when he would like to vote a certain way but fears the political consequences of his vote he just doesn't vote. And he has missed an awful lot of senate votes.
Basically, McCain is both a liar and a coward and challenges Bush for the number one spot on both counts. Hard to believe we could have two persons simultaneously serving our country both of whom are in competition for the number one and two rankings for the most unethical and corrupt politicians in our history. It is of note the degree to which they are both inexplicably oblivious of the struggles of the average citizen and their participation in creating our present dilemma. That they continue to advance policies and support those which continue to heap harm upon this country are unsurpassed in our history.
August 17, 2008 7:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
thepeoplechoose says:
I told this story on C-SPAN today;
I watched the meeting of McCain and Obama and the Evangelicals last night and McCain told a story that he told before, but I think he added a new aspect, "Christmas".
He said when he was a prisoner, a guard came in his cell and loosened his ropes for relief, he left and came back about 4 hours later and re-tightened them. McCain continued; Christmas day they let us out of our cell and that same guard came along and made the sign of the cross in the dirt with his foot. He ended the story in front of that evangelical audience. with; "there we were, two Christians".
In the 1959 movie Ben-Hur there was an elderly christian man with white hair and a white beard roaming the area looking for Christ. This area
was under Roman control and they were persecuting the Christians, so the old man had to hide his beliefs. He came upon another older man and they eyed each other. The other man drew the sign of the cross in the dirt with his staff, admitting to being a Christian too, and the other guy erased the sign in the dirt with his foot.
I'm very skeptical of this part of McCain's captivity.
August 17, 2008 4:38 PM | Reply | Permalink