To cut taxes or not to cut? That was… is … the question. If you ask John McCain, the answer is “yes”. From year to year he has voted against cutting taxes. Take 2001 for example.
On May 26, 2001, after then-Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee (R.I.) cast his vote against President Bush’s $1.35 trillion tax cut, he trudged back to his office, convinced, he recalled, that he had been the lone Republican to oppose the largest tax cut in two decades.
But Chafee’s staff told him that one other Republican, who had largely avoided the grueling efforts at compromise, had joined him in dissent. That senator, John McCain, was marching to his own beat, Chafee said, impervious to pressure from either side.
That was then. This is now.
Now that he is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, however, McCain is marching straight down the party line. The economic package he has laid out embraces many of the tax policies he once decried: extending Bush’s tax cuts he voted against, offering investment tax breaks he once believed would have little economic benefit and granting the long-held wishes of tax lobbyists he has often mocked.
McCain’s concerns — about budget deficits, unanticipated defense costs, an Iraq war that would be longer and more costly than advertised — have proved eerily prescient, usually a plus for politicians who are quick to say they were right when others were wrong. Yet McCain appears determined to leave such predictions behind.
Back in 2001, it seems that Senator McCain cared about the working class.
In 2001, just days before Bush’s first tax cut passed, McCain lamented on ABC’s “This Week” that, “I’d like to see much more of this tax cut shared by working Americans. . . . I think it still devotes too much of it to the wealthiest Americans.”
Today… well, when the working class and the middle class need it most… Politicians have a right to change their minds based on information they receive. But, it appears that Senator McCain’s mind now favors the wealthiest among us when the poorest are in need.
