McCain Economic Plan: Magic Wand Public Policy

Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) released a thirteen-page economic plan this week entitled “Jobs for America” that the campaign touts as “comprehensive” that is rife with incoherent and nonsensical plans like massive tax cuts while promising to balance the budget by 2013. Josh Marshall summed it up as such:

I think we may have come to that moment, that quick turn of events, that encapsulates the fact that there is apparently no limit to the howlers and nonsense that John McCain can throw out and still not generate collective guffaws or even scrutiny from the national political press.

Bear with me on this one because it’s genuinely mind-boggling.

Marshall continued to rip the plan as well as the silence of the media on the plan’s flaws and just pure incoherence and lack of even the most basic application of logic.

Now, the general routine is the face of this kind of candidate announcement is that journalists and economists look at the numbers to see if they add up. In most cases, the exercises generates fairly unsatisfying contradictory opinions, with some experts saying one thing and other experts another.

But here’s the thing. McCain doesn’t have any numbers. None. Not vague numbers of fuzzy math. He just says he’s going to do it. Any other candidate would get laughed off the stage with that kind of nonsense or more likely reporters just wouldn’t agree to give them a write up. But this is all over the place.

The centerpiece of this plan includes extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy indefinitely and reaping all the savings from “victory” in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is what’s behind McCain’s promise. I’ll do a lot of things that will get the deficit down. One of them is the the guarantee of victories in Iraq and Afghanistan and obviously that will save a lot of money.

As I said, this is the reductio ad absurdum of the mad pass John McCain gets on everything. He’s pledging to balance the budget in four years and when asked for details he says, ‘We’ll get back to you on that.’

Marshall wrote last night in prelude to the official release of the plan:

McCain’s people do realize that there is no budget mark down for ‘victory’. Whatever victory’s other merits, it is only reductions in expenditures directed (in the broadest sense) toward the war zones that get you actual budget savings.

Is McCain saying that both wars will be over by the end of his first term? And if so, is that victory with all or most of the troops staying on post-victory, as he’s implied? Or will they all have left by then? Remember, Adm. Mullen says we need more troops in Afghanistan to deal with spiraling situation developing there. But we don’t have any more because of our commitments in Iraq.

And if his four-year balanced budget promise is premised on rapid victory in both theaters, isn’t that sort of arbitrary timelines on steroids?

But, in actuality, what else could one expect from a guy who has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to economics? He may have just set the bar a bit too high for himself. I mean, thirteen full pages pages, single-spaced. Wow. Sounds like they pulled an all-nighter in Camp McCain like a lazy college student on a term paper — and the quality of product shows. To put it simply, this plan is pure imagination based on fantasyland expectations severely lacking in actual dollar figures and rife with inconsistencies — and that is a generous description.

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October 6, 2008