Maverick Budgeting
If you try to sit down and make sense of John McCain’s tax and budget proposals, you’ll find that they don’t make any sense. There are assertions that certain kinds of cuts could save way more money than is in fact there, you’ll find budget figures that count on eliminating all U.S. aid to Israel, inconsistent projections, goofy talk about balancing the budget by achieving “victory” in Iraq, etc. But everyone in the press “knows” that John McCain is responsible, so he doesn’t get asked about this stuff. But Sarah Palin’s not in the club, so Charlie Gibson asks her some basic questions about the budget and it turns out that there’s no there there. But this has nothing to do with her, and everything to do with policies outlined by McCain before Palin joined the ticket:
GIBSON: So let me break some of those down. You talk about spending. How much smaller would a McCain budget be? Where would you cut?
PALIN: We’re going to find efficiencies in every department. We have got to. There are some things that I think should be off the table. Veterans’ programs, off the table. You know, we owe it to our veterans and that’s the greatest manifestation that we can show in terms of support for our military, those who are in public service fighting for America. It’s to make sure that our veterans are taken care of and the promises that we’ve made to them are fulfilled.
GIBSON: So you’d take military off the table, the veterans’ benefits. That’s 20 percent of the budget. &Do you talk about entitlement reform? Is there money you can save in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid?
PALIN: I am sure that there are efficiencies that are going to be found in all of these agencies. I’m confident in that.
GIBSON: The agencies are not involved in entitlements. Basically, discretionary spending is 18 percent of the budget.
PALIN: We have certainly seen excess in agencies, though, and in — when bureaucrats, when bureaucracy just gets kind of comfortable, going with the status-quo and not being challenged to find efficiencies and spend other people’s money wisely, then that’s where we get into the situation that we are into today, and that is a tremendous growth of government, a huge debt, trillions of dollars of debt that we’re passing on to my kids and your kids and your grandkids … It’s unacceptable.
I suppose in practice a McCain administration’s budgets would just look like George W. Bush’s budgets or Ronald Reagan’s budgets — tax cuts and huge deficits. But it is telling that the woman John McCain chose as his running mate doesn’t seem to understand what “entitlements” are. Clearly, just as most citizens don’t know what the Bush Doctrine is, most people probably aren’t all that familiar with the meaning of the entitlement/discretionary distinction in federal budgeting. But it’s a big deal for people who actually pay attention to political and policy issues in the United States. I wonder if McCain chatted with Palin at all about her views on entitlement reform before adding her to the ticket?
47 Responses to “Maverick Budgeting”
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September 12th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
it is wonderful how there’s an all-purpose right-wing answer available for every question: how will we cut spending? efficiencies, of course! bureaucrats making 5-digit salaries are too comfortable!
however, i didn’t post to point out that palin is a well-equipped right-wing robot but rather to point out that i don’t think we would see a mccain administration with huge deficits: foreign creditors are unlikely to continue being quite as generous as they have been….
September 12th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
…But she’s not most citizens. She’s the best choice the Republicans could come up with.
A small town mayor doesn’t need to pay much attention to foreign policy. What goes on in the discretionary part of the Federal budget is important. What goes on with entitlements is important. More so for the Governor of a state. She should have thought about this….
September 12th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Charlie really nailed her with exactly the right questions. Except he was willing to accept whatever crap she spewed and move onto the next thing on his list.
September 12th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
I wonder if McCain chatted with Palin at all about her views on entitlement reform before adding her to the ticket?
No.
That has the been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.
September 12th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
I actually miss Tim Russert right about now.
September 12th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Why would Palin’s views have mattered, when McCain’s own actual views don’t matter?
September 12th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
This is one of the clearest pieces of evidence I’ve seen that cutting the fat and increasing efficiency really just means cutting the budget in the normal way. So most of the programs will be made more efficient (since of course all previous administrations were anti-efficiency and left all that fat in there to cut). But veterans benefits (or the whole military budget, as Gibson interprets it) are too important to be made more efficient!
September 12th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
What particularly frustrates me is the sense I get that she believes what she’s saying there. It’s not quite like her answer to the Bush Doctrine question, where she’s trying to just survive the question–in this case, I think she really does think that we can significantly lower the cost of the federal government by making agencies more efficient. It seems like an answer born partly of ignorance (if her lack of a response to Gibson’s breakdown of entitlement/discretionary spending is indicative) and partly from ideology–a truly toxic combination.
September 13th, 2008 at 12:14 am
1) It seemed that she really did not have any grasp of the structure of the federal spending pie. Did no one even show her a USA Today style pie chart or two? More disturbingly, as someone who went to the Federal trough, was she not even a little bit curious about the basics of the federal budget?
2) McCain has basically said the same thing as Palin, but he’s said it without seeming quite so dense. But his notion is pure fantasy. Eliminating all earmarks would net $18 billion. But since much of that ‘pork’ is actually things like grants to universities to study seal DNA, it would just go through traditional budgeting. So maybe McCain could yield $10 billion.
His high-income tax cuts plus eliminating the middle class AMT trap will blow a $400 billion/year hole in the budget.
He has simply shown NO credible way to balance the budget.
Why is that liberals get the tax-and-spend lable but men like McCain don’t get the Mortgage-the-entire-future-to-spend-now label?
September 13th, 2008 at 12:25 am
Levi Stahl:
you hit the nail on the head. She really has lived her entire adult (well political life) really believing more in platitudes than in actual facts and reality.
These are people who have never been big into critical thinking, or actually getting into the details. Face it, you do not attend 5 colleges in 6 years unless you just did not really dig the entire University ethos. I remember many of these individuals at the large State school in Tucson I attended. They were there not to learn, but to get a degree, party and make social connections. They leave college having gained little if any knowledge, critical thinking or a higher degree of curiosity. What they achieved was merely a collection of hijinks, trips, friends and a piece of paper from often dubious programs (Communications from other than top-notch media oriented schools like Syracuse are worthless).
So is it any surprise this woman thinks the way she does? Is it any wonder that deep down, her daily thoughts never drifted farther than Wasilla and perhaps her local Church?
And finally – anyone else think her accent/voice is going to get very, very annoying in a couple years and a few hundred more wrinkles?
She already is sounding shrill to me – but just wait until she is 50!!
September 13th, 2008 at 12:27 am
I don’t think you folks are understanding. Yes, it sounds like she doesn’t know the difference between entitlements and discretionary spending. But the thing no one’s mentioning here–it’s implicit in her statements that entitlements WILL be cut. Sure, they’ll call it something different–making them “more efficient”, but what it really means is they’ll look at veterans benefits and say “well, I don’t see why we need this fancy prosthetics research program–cut!”, probably cut scientific research (”bear DNA”) that doesn’t make sense to them, etc
September 13th, 2008 at 12:31 am
Ralph W. – actually, Perot attacked Bush very effectively in 1992 about the importance of cutting deficits. This is why I get frustrated when people seem to forget the critical role that Perot pushing that issue played in that election campaign, and how that helped Clinton win (as much as any genius political skill on his or the war room’s part). The problem is that the Democrats don’t have credibility in this area – they did in 2000 with Gore, but not anymore, in part because Americans seem to have forgotten that Democrats cut the deficit and the Republicans ballooned it (Kerry’s campaign didn’t really push that) and Obama’s own plans for a big middle class tax cut, government assistance for universal health care, and other spending increases aren’t exactly on-message for deficit fighting.
Of course he can say that he’s offsetting costs and willing to raise taxes on wealthy, etc., but it’s not the same monomaniacal on-message rhetoric that Perot was able to use to essentially dismantle the mystique of Reaganomics. It took him buying prime-time infomercials to force enough Americans to look at his charts to make a difference, but it did work for a while. Obama clearly isn’t ideologically inclined to do the same thing, though he’s clearly temperamentally much likelier to fix it than McCain before a real crisis hits.
September 13th, 2008 at 12:37 am
I wonder if everyone can see what’s really going on here.
I don’t think Palin is SUPPOSED to know what she’s talking about. I think the whole purpose for choosing her was so they could mock Obama by putting her out there to made these rambling, absurd generalizations so they can claim Obama does the same thing whenever he does an interview. Its painfully obvious in this series of answers that’s all she’s really doing. Its as if McCain decided he’d use the VP spot as an opportunity to ridicule his opponent by putting up this cartoon character from Alaska, having her BS her way through every interview and then suggest Obama does the very same thing. She’s not running for vice president, she’s doing amateur impressions.
September 13th, 2008 at 12:42 am
Obama needs to be hammering crap like this all the time. Republicans like to pretend tax cuts are free. when theyre actually forced to acknowledge that theyre not, they argue they can pay for trillions of dollars of tax cuts with what amounts to few tens of billions of dollars of spending cuts, with no mention of our already whopping budget deficit and projected entitlement growth in the next few decades. completely insane.
September 13th, 2008 at 12:50 am
I suppose when you’re mayor of a tiny town, making your finite number of departments/agencies run more efficiently can cuts costs in the first year or two.
Now I’d like her to explain how Wasilla had no debt when she became mayor, and had over $20 million in debt when she left. Palin claimed that the ice sports complex cost $13 million, and she received $27 million in earmarks at the same time. And they still don’t have public sewers.
With a town of 5,500 (pop. during her tenure) the property tax cuts couldn’t account for that kind of debt. The math doesn’t add up.
PEACE
September 13th, 2008 at 12:53 am
I think that the biggest gaffe in this series of questions is that she is saying ‘efficiencies’–which do not make sense as a noun sometimes–when she uses ‘ineffeciencies.’ She does not give any kind of substantive answer–at all.
September 13th, 2008 at 1:13 am
You know, John McCain has a presumably cancerous lump the size of a golf ball on the left side of his jaw and this woman is probably going to be the president in January, while our economy is utterly melting down. And that’s really fucking funny.
September 13th, 2008 at 1:22 am
“The problem is that the Democrats don’t have credibility in this area – they did in 2000 with Gore, but not anymore, in part because Americans seem to have forgotten that Democrats cut the deficit and the Republicans ballooned it (Kerry’s campaign didn’t really push that) and Obama’s own plans for a big middle class tax cut, government assistance for universal health care, and other spending increases aren’t exactly on-message for deficit fighting.”
It’s not the deficit that’s ever the underlying electoral issue. It’s simply the economy, stupid. It’s always the economy, stupid.
It’s amazing that after finally establishing a Democratic advantage on economics for the first time in a generation, we’ve had two foreign policy nominees in a row.
The nominations of Kerry and Obama have essentially neutralized the advantages the Democratic brand had developed on economics.
The Democratic intelligentsia is so cavalier about winning elections that it’s really hard to believe sometimes.
September 13th, 2008 at 1:24 am
spencersmom, there’s a funny little side note to the hockey arena that i read about (i think in the wsj) a few days ago: it would seem that mayor palin had the city proceed before it had full title to the land and someone sued and won damages and interest that represent something like 1.25M of the debt! i’ll have to dig back in and refresh myself on the details.
September 13th, 2008 at 2:05 am
I think she really does think that we can significantly lower the cost of the federal government by making agencies more efficient.
And I’m sure that she said the same while getting Don Young and Ted Stevens to rain money on Wasilla and then Alaska. Irregular verb, innit? I make legitimate requests for federal support; you get earmarks; he’s been indicted for pork-peddling.
Of course, the military-industrial complex is also sacrosanct. And thus goes America.
September 13th, 2008 at 2:14 am
Don’t be coy Matt, we all know he groped her and when she didn’t complain he gave her the job.
September 13th, 2008 at 2:51 am
What Brandon said. Palin doesn’t fully grasp the distinction between entitlements and discretionary spending, but may not care — she sounds ready and willing to cut pay-outs as well as agency staffing.
Instead of correcting her, Gibson should have asked if she is ready to cut back on Social Security and Medicare payments.
September 13th, 2008 at 3:57 am
Two statements:
and:
Basically, Palin’s swallowed the wingnut line that government ‘inefficiencies’ are solely on account of ‘bureaucrats’ using extra paperclips, as opposed to small-town mayors who love Jebus and shiny new things grasping for as much pork from their committee-chair Congresscritters as they can get away with.
That’s the doctrine: fire all the mid-level federal appointees and bulldoze a dozen civilian agencies, and you’ll magically balance the books. It’s just as deluded as the idea that earmarks make a dent in the budget. Want to balance the books? Manage relative decline. If keeping the gas pumps running and maintaining force projection at current levels are among the non-negotiables, everything else is fucked.
September 13th, 2008 at 4:21 am
Sure, Palin doesn’t understand the budget. But neither do the voters. I bet her answers sounded just fine to a lot of them.
September 13th, 2008 at 6:33 am
This attitude that “Government is the problem” is what brought us screw ups like FEMA (no experience necessary).
September 13th, 2008 at 6:52 am
Government is always the problem, except for things Republicans want.
September 13th, 2008 at 6:53 am
Well, we’ve gone from Welfare Queens driving Cadillacs to the store to by liquor with food stamps to being able to balance the budget by squeezing efficiencies out of the Social Security program.
That’s just swell.
Palin didn’t just learn those lines. She’s known that hoo-ha ever since she left her 5-6 alma maters. You don’t get elected to office as a Republican without squeezing efficiencies from bloated programs and you sure don’t get to be a VP candidate without it.
September 13th, 2008 at 7:25 am
Social Security, in fact, is a small, efficient agency, and any savings have to come out of benefits it pays.
Since SS and Medicare have been raised as potential targets for cost-cutting, why not Obama accusations that McCain will be seeking cuts in benefits? That ought to rile the seniors and the physicians.
September 13th, 2008 at 7:45 am
Well, if past performance is any indication, what we can expect from a President Palin (Shudder!!!!) are significant increases in spending, with very specific cuts to programs such as providing shelter to teen mothers and paying for forensic medical examinations for rape victims.
In two budget cycles as Alaska Governor she has increased spending 30%, while slashing funding for Covenant House from 5 million to 3.9 million, and yes it was Palin herself that did that reduction as part of her line item veto. To be fair, it was before her teen daughter got pregnant, but I don’t think Bristol will have to depend on Covenant House for shelter. Of course the state is flush right now with huge oil revenues flowing in (90%) of the revenue received by the state. In the two budget cycles she has presided over it looks as though the state is going to stash away about 6 billion dollars into the rainy day fund for when the oil runs out. Pretty good when you consider that the state budget when she took over was barely over 6 billion and she increased the giveaway to Alaska residents by $1200, but hardly experience that will be useful in Washington, where she won’t have a line item veto to punish her enemies and reward her friends and she won’t have oil companies footing the bill for all her increased spending.
As Mayor of Wasilla she increased spending by about 60% during her tenure and left a town she inherited with no debt with considerable debt. She increased spending for police, but allowed her police chief to slash a contingency fund that paid for forensic exams for rape victims, so Wasilla rape victims had to pay for their own exams. Of course before this was done Joe Biden had gotten the Violence Against Women Act passed, with a provision that stated that states that did not pay for these exams would be cut off from federal funding, so there is some truth to Palin’s claim that she told Congress “Thanks but no thanks” . But instead of “If we want a bridge, we will pay for it ourselves” she said “If our rape victims want an investigation, they’ll pay for it themselves.”
The problem is not so much that many of her budget decisions have been disasters (which they were), but that all of her budget experience has been in a fantasy land where none of the rules that govern federal budgeting apply. There is a huge difference between the federal budget and a budget that depends entirely on royalty revenues from an industry that is experiencing its greatest profit growth in history. She doesn’t have to make any tough decisions, just popular ones. People talk about her lack of foreign policy and national security experience, but in reality she is just as inexperienced in budget and fiscal policy.
September 13th, 2008 at 7:51 am
Wait — are Republicans required to actually do stuff to balance a budget?
I thought they just were required to declare themselves in favor of good budgeting and then that part of their job was done, and they could get back to giving money away to their own or crony corporations and local interests and to any industry they get lobbied to favor.
And then when it comes time to cut something they don’t like, they just start talking ’bout the ‘defsit’ again.
September 13th, 2008 at 8:45 am
You know, John McCain has a presumably cancerous lump the size of a golf ball on the left side of his jaw and this woman is probably going to be the president in January, while our economy is utterly melting down.
Better that than getting four years of Nukem McAmnesty.
September 13th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Is she really saying that eight years of Bush budgets supported by John McCain are so filled with fat that the American people are clambering for cuts? She seems to be saying that this is the main things occupying the minds of the voters.
I’m guessing that Bush budgets are prominent but not for ‘inefficiency’, but for rampant graft, stupidity and, at least in my case, the incredible cost of the Iraq invasion and its aftermath.
September 13th, 2008 at 9:47 am
What’s bizarre about this to my eyes is that Republicans already have a canned answer about Social Security–privatize the motherfucker. If she had any knowledge at all about her running mate’s policies, she could have leaned on “private accounts” as an explanation.
It would have been equally factually inaccurate–moving to a privatized system would cost a great deal more–but it wouldn’t necessarily reveal complete ignorance of the budget. But, of course, to know that she would need to have paid attention to national policy at some point in the last few years.
September 13th, 2008 at 9:57 am
per Social Security Online at ssa.gov, administrative expenses of the program in 2007 were about $5.5 billion, less than 1 percent of annual benefits paid out. The system is already running pretty lean.
September 13th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Palin is vexing in the same way Bush was. We’re left to ponder if she’s so stupid that at her age, and after a career in government, she doesn’t understand what “entitlements” like Social Security and Medicare are. Or, that she is putting on a politician Barbie, civics class is hard, act so she can avoid telling the viewers of her first major interview that the McCain administration will have to cut popular entitlement programs because they prioritize tax cuts for the rich as more important. I actually favor the latter. I think she’s playing the fool.
September 13th, 2008 at 10:16 am
bdbd: Maybe so, but that’s $5.5 billion more for Social Security administration than if you just got rid of everybody! See?
September 13th, 2008 at 10:40 am
What a stupid woman.
September 13th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Efficiencies are those one-room apartments without a full kitchen (and bath?) It’s nice to know she (and her brilliant GOP operative/Cliffs Notes for VPs) want to find all those rental units in the federal budget.
No way, no how, no McCain!
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