Drilling Without Oil, Tax Cuts Without Growth

by: Dean Baker

McCain proposed offshore drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, attempting to show he cares about lowering gas prices for everyday Americans. Despite the inability of this drilling to lower gas prices anytime soon, the media picked up on his posturing and promoted it, rather than offering a critique.
(Illustration: Everett Bogue / Getty Images)

    Senator McCain is in the unenviable position of running on the track record of a president with the worst economic performance since Herbert Hoover. He has adopted the strategy of ignoring the record while embracing his predecessor's policies. McCain is betting the media will be so incompetent that they will not notice. He might be right. The basic story here is very simple. The centerpiece of Senator McCain's economic agenda is the continuation of the Bush tax cuts. Of course, he has tossed out a few other items, but impact of his other proposals, such as ending earmarks, is trivial. For all practical purposes, McCain's economic agenda is Bush's tax cuts.

    We could have an interesting debate about whether giving tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the country is good economic policy, if we didn't already know the answer. We have had almost eight years of President Bush's tax cuts and the record is as clear as it can possibly be. When it comes to producing economic growth that benefits the middle class, the tax cuts were dismal failures.

    The economy is now in the process of sinking into the second recession of the second Bush administration, and President Bush already has the worst record on job creation of any president since Herbert Hoover. At the current rate of job loss, it is entirely possible President Bush will have created fewer private sector jobs in his entire eight years in office than the 2.6 million annual average for the eight years of the Clinton administration.

    It is virtually certain the wage for the typical worker will be lower when President Bush leaves office in January of 2009 than when he took office in January of 2001. This means most workers will have seen nothing from the benefits of productivity growth over the last eight years.

http://www.truthout.org/article/drilling-without-oil-tax-cuts-without-growth