Jonath makes the mistake of taking the McCain "economists" letter as an analytical statement, rather than as an expression of attitude written by spinmasters, and demands intellectual consistency:
Economists for Obama: McCain's Economist Supporters vs. Facts: Over at MarginalRevolution, Tyler Cowen has posted the text of an email... prominent, right-leaning economists (who) have endorsed John McCain's stated economic proposals... the usuals (e.g., Becker, Hassett, McCain chief economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin, Taylor, Harvey Rosen, Meltzer, etc.)... (NS) prominent economists who have earned their academic reputations.... I've previously discussed the enormous increase in deficits that would be caused by McCain's tax proposals, as scored by Len Burman and Greg Leiserson of the Tax Policy Center. So let me focus on the second paragraph (of the letter), which is uniformly contradicted by both facts and experience:
"His plan would control government spending by vetoing every bill with earmarks." Well, this one has already been repudiated by... John McCain's chief economic adviser, Doug Holtz-Eakin. I've already posted on this issue:
McCain has already had to change his "definition" of those nasty earmarks he'll eliminate (somehow, without a line-item veto). According to this story by the Politico's Ben Smith, Holtz-Eakin initially claimed that there were $100 billion in earmarks in the current budget, the idea presumably being that eliminating all of these earmarks would give McCain $100 billion to work with in paying for his tax cuts. After a former senior Democratic staffer, Scott Lilly, pointed out that many of these earmarks included stuff McCain supports, like money for Israel, Egypt and U.S. military construction, Holtz-Eakin stated that in fact the real amount of money associated with earmarks McCain would not fund (again, magically preventing them without a line-item veto) was only $16-18 billion.
"(I)mplementing a constitutionally valid line-item veto..." Clearly, this one is there to allow them to respond to criticisms, like the parenthetical reference in my earlier post, based on the fact that under current law, the President has no capacity to pick and choose which items to fund. President McCain will have to sign or veto actual statutes, not their components....
