President Bush’s policies on the economy, other than on taxes, have been a failure, suggested John McCain’s top economic policy adviser.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin said the only similarity between McCain’s economic plan and Bush’s is a commitment to keep taxes low.
“Sadly, it seems that is all President Bush understood in the economy,” Holtz-Eakin told Bloomberg Television. It is Barack Obama’s budget plan, not McCain’s, that resembles Bush’s policies, he said.
“It’s dedicated to the recent Bush tradition of spending money on everything,” Holtz-Eakin said.
Dan Tarullo, an economic adviser to Obama, defended the presumptive Democratic nominee’s plan to reopen the North American Free Trade Agreement to add new environmental and labor standards and get tougher on China for its trade policies.
Renegotiating NAFTA “is good for our workers in all three countries, and it’s good for the environment in all three countries,” said Tarullo, a professor at Georgetown University.
