If President, McCain Promises to Balance Budget By 2013

The Republican Presidential nominee, Senator John McCain promised on Monday that he vouches to balance the federal budget by 2013 if he becomes the next US President. He aims to bringing about this reform through changes in the entitlement programs.

 The McCain campaign released a policy paper on Monday saying that the balancing of the budget can only be brought about through a successful reform of the expenditure on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. However, the policy paper did not give an in-depth analysis of how it plans to accomplish this feat. Also mentioned in the paper was a demand for a one-year freeze in domestic spending. This would be subject to annual appropriations and facilitate a comprehensive review of the situation. The paper proposed that this measure would freeze overall spending growth at 2.4% annually. This remains a matter of deep speculation as the federal spending growth rate has been recorded to be growing at an average of more than 6% per year since the last five years.

Apart from these, the paper once again enumerated upon McCain’s health care proposal. It also stated that with McCain as President, there would be an increase in competition and affordability in the drug market as a result of rapid introduction of generic drugs and safer reimportation of other drugs. The McCain camp also intends to promote smoking cessation programs.