2008 John McCain Will Declare Victory on the Deficit
posted by on July 10 at 10:20 AM
Please peruse this clause from John McCain’s plan to balance the federal budget by 2013, and see if you can spot the part that doesn’t seem to make any sense:
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.
Forget that, as Slate reports, it’s assured that the logistics of a gradual withdrawal from Iraq will actually cost us more money in the short term, certainly with an effect that will be felt up to McCain’s 2013 deadline.
John McCain’s plan to get us out of our budget spiral is hinged on the idea that he’s going to kick so much ass in Iraq and Afghanistan that he’ll be able to use it as a platform from which to slash the federal budget. It would be like him announcing that his plan for social services involved “whooping its ass!”, or that he’d solve the conflict in Palestine with “his bare hands and his will to win!” He’s instituted his insane tough-guy rhetoric as an actual arm of government policy.
But it gets way, way worse: His plan “Jobs For America” (.pdf warning!) is actually just a huge, numberless, gaping position paper filled with “fight’n!” slogans. He calls for “strong” economic growth as part of his strategy, but doesn’t put a numerical percentage on how “strong” it would have to be to zero out the budget. His plan to “Eliminate Wasteful Spending” calls for “leadership, courage, and choices,” yet fails to mention a single specific program that he’d curtail or disband. Some of the only specifics in the entire plan come from his stillborn energy policy, the Lexington Project, which spawned the off-shore drilling craze and the $300 million dollar jackpot for building the better car battery.
It’s not even policy. It’s economics-as-middle-school-pep-rally.
McCain's own people admit that his "Eliminate Wasteful Spending" plan will save a whopping $18 bn if they're lucky. Meanwhile, his tax plans will add another $300 bn a year to the deficit, and his war plan costs even more than Bush's. Net result: economic collapse, or possibly the Chinese bankers stepping in and delivering some hard truths. If China stops seeing our treasury notes as a good investment, our entire economy goes into free-fall.
How long do you bet it'll take before he steals Chuck Norris from Huckabee and touts him as our economic solution: repaying the national debt one can of whoopass at a time!
The only possible savings I can figure he's actually hoping to generate (as opposed to the flat-out lying in the 'plans' mentioned here) are the entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. In other words, roll back the New Deal. I know there's a lot of talk about moving past the Culture Wars from the sixties, but Republicans are still fighting the Culture War of the thirties.
It seems like bankrupting the government is part of the plan, not an unfortunate side effect.
Since all the costs were financed with deficit spending...all the savings isn't savings. It's just borrowing less. We're in a deficit even without Iraq/Afghanistan war spending...and ending those wars isn't suddenly going to generate income.
Now, now, I read through the plan and it just isn't true that there are no numbers in there. In fact, most of the proposals that will increase the deficit have numbers attached. $2 billion/year for "clean coal", $5000/family or $2500/individual for health care, etc. It's just every proposal that would get him closer to his goal of balancing the budget that has no numbers attached, or even any kind of specifics that would allow you to guess at the numbers...
@3:
He does imply that changes to Medicare and Social Security are part of his plan, though he likes to be as vague as possible especially regarding what he's doing with Social Security. The thing is, he's claiming he'll balance the budget in 4 years, but a long term solvency fix for Social Security shouldn't affect the budget over the next 4 years. What's more, Social Security is in the black, so it hardly seems fair to balance the budget at the expense of Social Security.
It's worse even than Ryan S. paints it. McCain's plan is like saying,
Victory?
Maybe if you're the Red Chinese that McCain is working for.
How is this any worse than the standard supply-side argument of lower taxes generating more revenue than the previous higher taxes?
Chip @9, the lower tax/higher revenue argument is actually rational in the right context.* McCain's plan for GWoT savings is inherently bullshit.
* Oversimplification: Setting tax rates is similar to retail pricing; take the up slope of profit margin (tax rate) and the down slope of unit sales (taxable economic activity) and then find the peak of the combined functions. Supply-siders' self-serving game is to blindly insist that the peak occurs infinitely close to zero (like Wal-Mart customers convinced that price is all that matters).
Slopes on graphs? NERD PATROL!
Tax cuts _are magic._ All tax cuts increase revenue and balance budgets!
flamingbanjo, painting the Fed. Gov't into a corner with deficit spending has been a stated goal of the lulu right since the Reagan years. They like having the gov't weak, it keeps it from upsetting any applecarts. Surely you're aware of Grover Norquists's quote re. drowning it in a bathtub?
Oh, and it's not just the Culture Wars of the 30's, and I'm not being paranoid: they want to roll back the Progressive era of McKinley & TR, too. Damn that federal slaughterhouse inspection! I wish I was making this up. I am not.
There's really very little secret what the Turtlemen are up to. Times are tough in this flattening world, fellow citizens. Do like McCain or Friedman and find yourself a loaded spouse! Then lecture about the need for belt-tightening.
Oh, and how 'bout that wacky premise? All an imperial power has to do to win a counterinsurgency campaign is TRY EXTRA HARDER! Oh yeah. Works every time. For as long as you're willing to pound your head against the wall.
Home team advantage: patience, and nowhere else to go. And usually, nothing else to do but fuck with you.
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