By David Nather, CQ Staff

At a forum on the presidential candidates’ economic plans last week, John McCain adviser Kevin Hassett said he wasn’t sure if the Arizona Republican supports a “pay as you go” approach to federal budgeting: enacting tax cuts only with offsetting new revenues or cuts in spending. “I’ve never spoken to the senator about that,” confessed Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Perhaps he should have. Four years ago, when his party ran Congress, McCain was so insistent on paying for new tax cuts that he and three other GOP senators — Maine’s Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe and Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee — held up the annual budget process for months. Now, he’s put out an economic plan with such expensive tax cuts, and so little detail on how to pay for them, that fiscal watchdog groups say it doesn’t look like the work of a pay-as-you-go presidential candidate. Based on what McCain has outlined so far, “the policies have been more on the blow-a-hole-in-the-deficit side than the pay-as-you-go side,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

NOT THE ’04 MCCAIN: He was an absolutist then. (GETTY IMAGES \ CHRIS HONDROS)

The executive director of the anti-deficit Concord Coalition, Robert L. Bixby, says there’s no evidence McCain has given up on pay-as-you-go. “It’s not like he’s ever said, ‘I’ve renounced PAYGO,’ ” Bixby said. “It just looks like there’s more flexibility in his approach to PAYGO than there was four years ago.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director who’s now a McCain adviser, says the candidate is still a supporter of pay-as-you-go principles but “believes we need to apply them to the appropriate baseline.” For McCain, Holtz-Eakin says, that means no longer assuming that programs last forever, even after they expire — a change that would be a tough sell with lawmakers who like to protect their spending projects.

It’s also a notable change from the senator’s rhetoric in the 2004 budget fight. At the time, there were no qualifiers. “Our failure to start making some of the tough decisions will land squarely on the backs of our children and grandchildren, and their financial future will be strapped with digging out of the holes that have been created by our actions and inactions,” he said then.

Now, Democrats have written pay-as-you-go requirements into House and Senate rules (though they ignored them last year to pass temporary relief from the alternative minimum tax). But McCain has proposed enough tax cuts to reduce federal revenues by as much as $5.7 trillion over 10 years, according to the Tax Policy Center, a think tank run by the nonpartisan Brookings Institution and the liberal Urban Institute.

Holtz-Eakin challenged the estimate in a guest blog on the center’s Web site, saying it didn’t factor in various spending cuts McCain has also proposed. But when reporters on a conference call last month asked McCain’s advisers to detail all of their cost and savings estimates for his economic plan in writing, they refused.

“I don’t know anyone who thinks you can get anywhere near this amount of spending cuts out of waste, fraud and abuse, and earmarks,” the main sources of savings the McCain campaign usually cites, Bixby said.

The one saving grace, MacGuineas said, is that Hassett describes McCain’s economic plan as a work in progress, with plans for deeper cuts in spending likely this summer. “The McCain people will say, ‘Don’t judge us yet,’ ” she said.