A Life Of Lies And Delusion

McCain and taxes is examined at Slate:

This year, McCain has tried to recast his earlier opposition to Bush's rate cuts as a vote in favor of budgetary prudence. In a January appearance on Meet the Press, McCain said, "[T]he reason—major reason why I was opposed to it was because there was no spending cuts. I was proud to be part—a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution. And we had tax cuts, but we had spending cuts that went right along with it."

There are three problems with this statement.

1) It's absurd to cite Ronald Reagan as a model of budgetary prudence. Under Reagan, the budget deficit ballooned from $74 billion to $155 billion, setting at one point a still-unbeaten record of 6 percent of gross domestic product. "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," Dick Cheney famously confided

2) If McCain is such a deficit hawk, why does he refuse for all time to raise income-tax rates?

3) Look at McCain's Senate floor statement from the 2001 tax vote. It included not one word about the need to keep spending in check.

[There are a number of reasons why] McCain drifted leftward on taxes ...

But no one should underestimate the role played by sheer irrationality. Take another look at that 2001 floor statement. In it, McCain pointed out something that's seldom remembered. Three days before McCain cast his famous vote against Bush's tax cut (on final passage), he voted for it (on Senate passage). Why the change? It seems that McCain had wanted to cut the top rate one point, from 39.6 percent to 38.6 percent. When the Senate voted that down, Sen. Charles Grassley, who then chaired the finance committee, offered as a compromise to set the top rate at 36 percent. That version cleared the Senate with McCain's support. When the bill came back from House-Senate conference, however, the top rate had been knocked back down to 35 percent. Based on that one-point difference, McCain declared war on his president and his party.