Hullabaloo

Monday, July 07, 2008

 
Victory Jackpot

by dday

John McCain let slip his economic plan today, and the big surprise is that oil companies and obscenely rich people are the winners. No, wait, that's not surprising, but it is the natural outcome of reductions in the corporate tax rate and extensions of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. The losers? Anyone who needs Social Security to survive, because their benefits will be cut and their program privatized.

(This might be a proven, winning line of attack, Democrats.)

But the high comedy comes on page 4 of the plan, when he explains how he'd balance the budget, despite massive tax cuts, in his first term:

• The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.

Victory is the answer! Never mind that McCain wants us to stay in Iraq for a hundred years, or anything. And that garrisoning troops, providing food and shelter and training and arms, and giving them the role of engaging in police actions that they're already doing right now, you know, costs a lot of money. John Sidney McCain III knows that when you win a war, you get the $644 billion dollar prize behind door #2!

Leading economists do agree, however. They like everything about McCain's plan except for the plan:

This morning, the McCain campaign sent out a press release: OVER 300 ECONOMISTS SIGN STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF JOHN MCCAIN'S ECONOMIC PLAN.

The statement leaves out two big chunks of McCain's economic argument: the gas tax holiday and his promise to balance the budget by the end of his first term -- there's literally nothing in the release that mentions the deficit or national debt.

Maybe if there was one number relating to the budget - one - they'd be a bit more comfortable with it.

This is just a stupid platform. McCain constantly talks about reducing spending but won't touch the military budget (actually, he'd increase it). Yet he somehow thinks that "winning the wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have shown to cost increasing amounts of money every year, will save money. I guess that win will happen within a year or so, otherwise the savings would be offset by the "fight to win." So he's calling for a timetable of total withdrawal and victory within a year?

Menawhile, he wants to eliminate "wasteful spending" but every time you specify a piece of spending which anyone finds important he exempts it. And really the only spending that gets set for reductions is toward entitlements, which wreak havoc on Americans in horrible ways, like keeping the poor out of poverty and allowing the elderly to receive medical care. His health care plan is nonexistent, his energy plan consists of drilling for minute amounts of oil and building ridiculously costly nuclear power plants without a plan to store the radioactive waste, and his plan for the middle class and small businesses includes unrelated items like eliminating the estate tax. This is a conservative fantasy document.

And yet, it's probable that little will come of this. As Atrios said.

McCain's joke budget is horseshit, but as we know Republicans cut taxes and cut spending and balance the budget, just like the most popular preznit EVAH Ronald Reagan did, even when they, you know, don't, and so their budgets don't actually have to make sense. Tax cuts are free and wars are free. Only Democrats need to "pay for" any of their proposals, it's just understood that Republicans are "fiscal conservatives."

Serious journalists like Ted Koppel have their brain turn to mush when thinking about hard things like numbers, yet they know enough to ask the tough questions about paying for campaign promises - to Democrats, at least.


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dday 7/07/2008 11:09:00 AM |