The Folly of McCain’s Newest Tax Proposal
John McCain unveiled his new tax proposal this week as an elixir to cure the middle classes pervasive economic woes, but a close look at the proposal shows that it is just more supply-side, trickle down hand outs to those who need it least. The proposal would have little if any impact on the middle class voters that John McCain is pandering to.
The problem with McCain’s proposal is the current ownership structure of stock holdings. The majority of stocks today are held by institutions, with 75% of all equities being held in pension plans, 401k plans, endowments, and the like. The problem for McCain, as it relates to his capital gains tax proposal, is that these plans are already exempt from paying any capital gains tax. When Hedge funds are added into the mix, hedge funds who have finagled a 15% set tax, often called a carrying fee, the percentage of total stock ownership exempt from Mr. McCain’s plan rises to 85%. What slice of the remaining 15% is made up of the middle class, families making less than $200,000 per year? Barack Obama likely wishes he had the figure at the ready when McCain unveiled his plan at last nights debate in Hempstead as it is a modest .75% or less than $4 per middle class family.
This plan, along with Mr. McCain’s mortgage proposal (another supposed middle class salve whose true boost is to the very reckless bankers who helped precipitate the current financial crisis) are clear signs that like President Bush, the Republican candidate is firmly allied with big business and corporate interests at the expense of Main Street and the middle class. With the nation in the midst of a financial crisis and working families suffering the brunt of it, it seems unlikely that those sort of proposals can lift John McCain into the White House.
Moral Hazard in the McCain Bailout Plan
John McCain’s new homeowner bailout is really just another bailout of the reckless banking system that brought us such lovely instruments as No Documentation Loans, Teaser Packages, NINJA (No Income, No Asset, No Job) Loans, and all those other packages that brought our housing industry to the brink of financial ruin. McCain’s genius idea is for the taxpayers to repurchase all these questionable mortgages at full face value and then convert them into more attractive loans. Contrary to what McCain says, it is the banks that are the beneficiarry here as all of their reckkless loans are paid off at full value. Essentially, all of this negative equity would get transferred from homeowners and private lenders to the overburdened taxpayer. So how is this for risk/reward benefit analysis - The more reckless and irresponsible you are in managing finances, whether lender or lendee, the more you benefit from John McCain’s plan.
The plan, which amounts to a massive transfer of taxpayer treasure to ill-behaving banks and their shareholders, is a disaster that runs completely contrary to those conservative values that John McCain supposedly espouses.
Post-partisian Hogwash
This whole notion of post-partisianism, reaching across the aisle, and getting things done runs contrary to our very structure of government and the intent of the founding fathers. Knowing how officials thirst for and abuse power they created a structure that would both limit the ability to pool too much power and forestall the country moving too far too fast in any particular direction. What we we now label with the pejorative “gridlock” our founding fathers fancied as a balance of powers. With that in mind and also factoring that the first attempts to push through nationalized health care began in the Roosevelt administration (that would be Teddy, not Franklin), how much do we really expect Obama or McCain to accomplish?
McCain Supports Waterboarding. A Maverick No More.
Talk about hypocrisy. Republican nominee in waiting, John McCain had a golden opportunity today to illustrate how he values principal over ideology, and his willingness to thumb his nose at the Republican establishment to do what he knew was right. He failed.
McCain voted against an intelligence bill that would have banned waterboarding.  Wow. What happened to McCain’s own time in a Vietnamese prison camp? Does that experience get sold out in order to buy the conservative vote this November?
The Maverick, folks, is nothing but fiction.
The Anti-McCain Movement
They cite his Ideology, but conservatives really just don’t like him.
  The conventional wisdom is that conservatives oppose John McCain because they feel he is too liberal.  While he has staked out positions at odds with the conservative establishment in campaign finance reform, amnesty for immigrants, support for cap-and-trade, and opposition to the Bush tax cuts, he really has not strayed from the conservative line much more than George W. Bush - no child left behind, immigration reform, prescription drug benefit, farm subsidies, steel tarrifs - who is held close to the conservative heart (though not as much as he was).  The ideological argument just doesn’t make a ton of sense in explaining the animosity McCain’s own party feels for him.  More likely it is that they just don’t like the senator.  There are rumblings about McCain’s temperament that have been around for years and even questions of his mental fitness due in part to his years in a Vietnamese prison camp.  Many of these whispers, which have been spreading around the internet recently, have originated in conservative circles.  Conservatives have also never forgiven McCain for his behavior in the 2000 primary.  His references to Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as agents of intolerance caused the evangelical wing to view him as an enemy and his television commercials comparing George W. Bush to Bill Clinton were widely hailed in his party.  Causing even greater distrust, though were McCain’s staunch opposition to the Bush tax cuts as tax cutting is the hallmark of the conservative agenda.  What does this all mean?  Well, if one looks a little deeper at McCain’s supposed “big night” last night they’ll see that most of his victories came in states that republicans tend to lose in the general election.  The so called “red states” went mainly to Mike Huckabee.  There is no way a republican can win in November without winning the south and with the widespread distrust of John McCain in those regions it seems very plausible that those voters might just stay home this fall.  If that happens we will be looking at a President Obama or a President Clinton.  It’s hard to imagine that is more preferable to republicans than a President McCain.Â
McCain Party Switch Story Resurfaces on Heels of Super Tuesday
Interesting timing—this story released in today’s issue of The Hill—detailing John McCain’s dalliance with the Democratic party after his brutalization by George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina Primaries. The courtship, it is reported, followed Jim Jeffords abandonment of the GOP, a move that shifted the balance of power in the senate.Â
Â
The story itself has been around for years, the curious factor being why it has resurfaced at this moment, on the heels of a race defining primary day this coming Tuesday. It shows the distrust and hostility towards McCain, inherent in his own party. In a year when Democratic turnout is expected to be spectacularly high, can McCain realistically expect to compete bearing such animus from his own party?
