McCain warns of spending woes
Posted: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 5:31 PM by Carrie Dann
From NBC's Adam Aigner-Treworgy
INDEPENDENCE, MO – At the Harry Truman Library Institute earlier today, McCain officially announced his return to Washington to vote on Congress’s Wall Street bailout legislation, saying that if the bill “fails in Congress yet again, the present crisis will turn into a disaster.”
“As credit disappears, students will no longer be able to get loans for college, and families looking for a new home will be unable to get a loan,” McCain said. “New car sales will come to a halt. Businesses will have difficulty securing credit for operations and may be unable to pay employees. If we fail to act, the gears of our economy will grind to a halt.”
McCain had an even less optimistic prediction for the unemployment numbers set to be released at the end of this week, proclaiming that the country’s “government is on the wrong track, our economy is struggling.”
Unsurprisingly, McCain touted his own economic and energy plans as crucial to solving the current crisis. He reintroduced the one-year discretionary spending freeze he first called for shortly after securing his party’s nomination, saying that the current size of the nation’s debt must be taken into account.
“We must also realize that this rescue plan has serious implications for future spending,” McCain said. “We can’t dedicate more than, possibly more than a trillion dollars to rescue failing institutions, and then go right back to business as usual in Washington – as if there were no end to the resources of government or to the patience of taxpayers.”
Heeding his own repeated calls for a temporary pause to partisan bickering, McCain didn’t mention his opponent’s name today, but he did criticize “some” people who disagreed with his approach to energy independence – a critique that is usually accompanied by Obama’s name.
“Some still insist that we can achieve energy independence without more drilling and without more nuclear power,” McCain said. “But Americans know better than that.”
